by Tim Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2014
Eye-opening to those who didn’t know; another slap in the face to those who did.
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A scathing primer on well-known but unaddressed criminal justice system discrimination against the poor, minorities, and the mentally ill.
Debut author Anderson, a prison reformer, National Guardsman, and ex-Marine, takes readers on a short, conscience-jarring excursion into the harsh realities of American justice. Now that the United States far outranks other countries in the sheer number of people behind bars, Anderson deftly highlights the ominous emergence beginning in the 1970s of what he calls an ideology-driven prison-industrial complex that, in addition to being a major government employer, is turning incarceration into a profit center for certain private businesses. Statistics he provides show that in 1970, on the eve of Nixon’s war on drugs, some 400,000 Americans were incarcerated. By 2010, the prison population had leaped to an astounding 2.5 million, including large numbers of low-level, nonviolent offenders whose real crime was not having enough money for adequate legal representation. Few went to trial; nearly all were compelled to cop a plea to avoid potentially heavier sentences. African-Americans make up a disproportionately large share of all inmates, evidence of what Anderson calls the new Jim Crow. This massive, taxpayer-funded lockup is now a multibillion industry that employs, according to Anderson’s statistics, some 750,000 people at the federal, state, and local levels. That’s not counting employees of privately run prisons. Concurrently, Anderson says, the last vestiges of pre-1970s programs for rehabilitation and mental health have given way to a more punishing and unforgiving approach that is quick to throw away the key. Anyone who has seen the crowded parking lots around courthouses, jails, and prisons cannot doubt that perps are, in a perverse way, major employers in an industry that too often produces only broken lives and more of the same. Anderson does a fine job bringing this out. He also scores in suggesting that we, the un-incarcerated, should be alarmed by police armed to the nines, plus the suddenly more common governmental imposition of what amounts to marshal law before and after major storms and in reaction to events such as the Boston Marathon bombing. Anderson gives every indication of being a left-oriented ideologue, but this hardly means we can dismiss all he has to say in this barbed wire blast.
Eye-opening to those who didn’t know; another slap in the face to those who did.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491746264
Page Count: 150
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Bari Weiss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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