by Tony Platt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 2019
A thoroughly leftist, intermittently applicable look at the state of American criminal justice.
A sobering review of the ills of the American criminal justice system and a few prescriptions for reform.
Police arrest around 14 million people each year in the United States, leaving 65 million people with criminal records and 20 million with a history of incarceration. The American criminal justice system, Platt (Affiliated Scholar/Center for the Study of Law & Society, Univ. of California; Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past, 2011, etc.) argues, is unique in its approach to prisons and jails. Tracing the history of incarceration and its complex roots, he thoroughly discusses how class, race, and gender shape the criminal justice system. Race and militarism play particularly central roles in what the author views as a dysfunctional approach to criminalization. He also tracks the historic influence of politics, fear, private policing, and international business. Platt believes correcting these problems will be difficult, citing a long history of failed reforms that remind us to “make sure the velvet glove does not cover an iron fist.” The author encourages readers to re-examine criminal stereotypes and to both value the incarcerated and appreciate their attempts at resistance. While reviewing the modern political approach to law and order, Platt chronicles his hopes and frustrations, which seem to ebb and flow with liberal and conservative administrations. The author is decidedly leftist; he even joined a Marxist party until its implosion in the 1980s. Platt calls for bold thinking but never quite offers groundbreaking solutions that might otherwise make the book more useful. Most of his suggestions, tucked away at the end of the book, are familiar and widely analyzed elsewhere—e.g., reining in private security operations, reducing incarceration and deportation of immigrants, and welfare reform. Ultimately, the author focuses less on these solutions than on the intrinsic and historic barriers to any reform. Still, the historical analysis will give pause to even the most ardent supporters of law enforcement agencies.
A thoroughly leftist, intermittently applicable look at the state of American criminal justice.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-08511-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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