by Sarah Garland ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2009
A valuable exploration of an important cultural phenomenon, but Garland’s sympathy for her subjects occasionally clouds her...
Startling revelations of how bigotry and gang violence are transforming once-bucolic suburbs.
While working on her graduate studies at NYU in 2004, New York Times contributor Garland became acquainted with the surprisingly fertile gang scene in Hempstead, Long Island. She wondered how this community—one of the first planned suburbs on the island, long since grown rough-edged—was infiltrated by Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street, Latino gangs renowned for their violence. After meeting with several Salvadorean teens at the high school, the author found that their bravado masked deep trauma and alienation. The roots of the suburban gang explosion, she writes, began during El Salvador’s brutal civil war. Both government and rebel forces recruited adolescent soldiers, many of whom emigrated to scattered American communities with their wartime stressors unaddressed. Garland’s interviews reveal a depressingly familiar pattern. These recent immigrants—most hampered by linguistic and other difficulties—join small-time gang cliques for a sense of belonging and protection. The cliques then develop intense rivalries, which spawn murderous mayhem for which suburban police are unprepared. The author also tracks a narrative of homegrown viciousness. White working-class residents of towns like Freeport and Farmingville react despicably to the new arrivals, attempting to outlaw day-labor activities while gangs of white teens make sport out of attacking “Mexicans.” Garland offers empathetic portraits of the troubled adolescents and beleaguered cops trying to stanch the spiraling violence, and she helpfully examines how the lack of regional planning on Long Island created de facto segregation, as “a bunker mentality had set in when it came to protecting communities from outsiders.” The author offers few uplifting conclusions, suggesting that these communities’ unwillingness to embrace new arrivals will only empower the gangs.
A valuable exploration of an important cultural phenomenon, but Garland’s sympathy for her subjects occasionally clouds her examination of the gangs’ seemingly pointless sadism.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56858-404-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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by Sarah Garland ; illustrated by Sarah Garland
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by Sarah Garland & illustrated by Sarah Garland
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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