Enlightening and entertaining.
A wide-ranging, politically acute inquiry into the history of travel and tourism, as seen by a south Indian writer and translator.
Attending a lecture by a travel videographer on "the travel habits of different demographics," Habib heard him proclaim, “Europeans travel in August” and “cruises are for retired Americans.” Then came the kicker: “People from the Third World do not travel; they immigrate.” Born in Kerala, India, now living in Brooklyn, the author is a traveler and an immigrant, sometimes a tourist, as well. All these perspectives play a role in this collection of essays. Habib opens by contrasting her experience as a traveler with that of a white woman she met in Turkey, segueing into a history of guidebooks and an interrogation of the association between travel and privilege. “But what if," she wonders, "instead of being a hole in the self, [lack of privilege] is more akin to a window? A crack through which the light gets in, a third eye that reveals the magic-mushroom hybridity of the world we live in?" Another essay describes her months as a new mother in Brooklyn, finding solace in aimlessly riding buses; Brooklyn, she proclaims, is "a flaneur's paradise." Most essays combine the history and historiography of travel with engaging personal narratives—e.g., her white American husband getting foiled in his plan for a romantic trip to Paris because his brown wife cannot get the paperwork in time. Habib includes funny stories about craving Thai food in Barcelona and her biophobia (fear of nature). A wonderful afterword explains "Why I Use ‘Third World In This Book.’ ” Although some find the term derogatory, she argues, “To speak of the Third World is to bring it into being…It’s not offensive to me. Its nasty women, bad hombres, and shitholes are dear to me.
Enlightening and entertaining.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781646220151
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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