Though replete with engaging vignettes, Erzen’s work is too narrowly focused and unrevealing.
Erzen (Religion and Gender Studies/Univ. of Puget Sound; Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It, 2012, etc.) examines the rise of ministries in some of America’s largest prison systems, critiquing their motives and effectiveness.
The author’s research is based mainly on such prisons as Texas’ Darrington Unit and the Louisiana State Penitentiary, along with a smattering of other prisons in other states. Erzen focuses especially on Protestant Christian ministries, which evangelize prisoners with the goal of transforming them into ministers within the prison system itself. Though admitting at times that these ministries provide a certain level of meaning and self-esteem for prisoners serving lengthy sentences, on the whole, it seems the author sees these ministries as self-serving ways of controlling a bloated prison population. Ultimately, she argues, they continue a race-based view of retribution, punishment, and proper “place” in society, which goes back to antebellum days. Erzen also notes that faith-based prison ministries fail to rise above a simple focus on the prisoner at the expense of a larger view of the prison problem: “In focusing on individual conversion, many faith-based prison ministries neglect the broader issues of how people came to prison and end up fortifying the prison’s rationale of control, surveillance, governance, and vengeance.” Unfortunately, the author focuses too heavily on a handful of large prisons in the South, problematically assuming that these cases mirror a national trend. Readers are wondering what faith-based prison ministries in Maine or Minnesota or Montana must be like, as opposed to those in Texas and Louisiana. Erzen also laments the predominance of Evangelical and Pentecostal denominations in prison ministries, while traditions as diverse as Islam and Wicca are underrepresented, yet she goes on to admit this trend is due to a lack of volunteers from other faith traditions.
Though replete with engaging vignettes, Erzen’s work is too narrowly focused and unrevealing.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8998-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
