No ease anywhere, but the text conveys a dreamlike sense of standing outside oneself and observing that keeps things from...
An unsettling account of trying to connect with inmates at a Vermont jail through a literature class.
A deeply unhappy graduate student seeking something beyond “a relatively narrow, officially approved life with officially approvable people,” newcomer Padnos in 1999 stakes a claim at the ratty world of the Woodstock Regional Correctional Facility, a waystation for those awaiting trial. Inmates don’t flock to his basement classroom, but there is a slow accrual of interest from the men, many of them quite young, who have been accused of committing unspeakable crimes. These crimes will be spoken of in grim detail that nearly makes a reader want to turn away in dread. But it is through their circumstances that Padnos comes to profile the students who sit in his classroom, where menace hangs in the air with greater weight than the words of Walt Whitman or Stephen King. Though he often hears the inmates’ stories through a prism of suspicion—trust appears to be a word with little application here—the author tries to keep jadedness at bay. The stories voice the men’s longings, he knows, even if those longings are apocalyptic in nature and substance. Padnos wants his students to find some reverb with the material, to stitch it together with what motivated their acts and what they had hoped to achieve by them: “The goal was to jerk them out of their routine, to help them see their lives with the clarity of an observer.” Often enough, this leads them deeper into the desperate. Huck Finn may be a universal icon, but what strikes home at Woodstock is the cold comfort of a Denis Johnson story. “Their lives have been rich in sorrow and strangeness,” Padnos writes of his students. “They’re wealthy at least in these departments.”
No ease anywhere, but the text conveys a dreamlike sense of standing outside oneself and observing that keeps things from getting too scary.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6909-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Anthropologist Kitzinger's (Women as Mothers, 1979) dreary picture of the current state of motherhood in the West leaves one wondering why anyone bothers anymore. New mothers, she says, are devalued by society and perhaps by themselves, prey to the exhortations of the medical establishment and so-called parenting experts, and plied by the media with images of unattainably perfect motherhood. She contrasts the West, where medicalized birth is ``depersonalized,'' with traditional cultures, where childbirth remains a ``social act.'' No doubt a society, such as ours, that still views motherhood as a deviation from the norm needs some attitude adjustment. But the question still seems open as to whether a woman would rather have prenatal care in the form of regular, if alienating visits to the obstetrician or in the form of exhortations, made to Jamaican women, not to drink soursop juice to avoid excessive labor pain. Kitzinger provides an unusual and enlightening tour of mothering practices around the world, from India to Zambia, Israel, and China. She is suggesting that we combine the best of mothering traditions from pre-and post- industrial societies—but how to accomplish it must be the subject of another book.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-40776-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Though the administration may be remembered as the worst in American history, the people seem mostly silent. One wishes that...
New York Times columnist Rich delivers a savaging sermon on the US government’s “rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of ‘compassionate conservativism,’ the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts”—and so much more.
Anyone who knows his work will know that Rich is no fan of either George Bush, a man “not conversant with reality as most Americans had experienced it,” or the Bush administration. In this blend of journalism and mentalités-style history—that is, the study of the mindsets that underlie and produce events—Rich looks closely and critically at the White House’s greatest hits, from the 2001 defense of gas-guzzling as essential to the American way of life to “Heckuva job, Brownie” to the ongoing morass of Iraq. By Rich’s account, of course, that parade of missteps is organic; Bush and company cannot help but err. In an effort to disguise that track record, the Republicans have exercised single-minded control of the grand narrative of the last five years, at least in part because they have exercised quasi-totalitarian control over the news media. (They are nearly forgotten already, but one needs to remember Judith Miller, Jeff Gannon, Karen Ryan and various columnists and commentators paid off to repeat the party line.) Not for nothing did a White House adviser reveal to one journalist that his bosses were set on creating their “own reality,” one that all Americans were expected to share; not for nothing did that reality include spinning amazing lies about everything from the death of football- and war hero Pat Tillman to the kidnapping of Jessica Lynch to the government’s preparedness for Katrina. And yet, and yet . . .
Though the administration may be remembered as the worst in American history, the people seem mostly silent. One wishes that Rich had explored that particular mentalité along with the others he so fluently discusses.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2006
ISBN: 1-59420-098-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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