A brave, honest search for answers regarding incarceration.
An impassioned look inside the lives of a few inmates, “flawed, damaged, and culpable, but still human.”
In her unconventional examination of two individuals—her adopted brother and a notorious mobster—with complicated criminal records and histories of incarceration, poet, activist, and educator Imarisha (Scars/Stars, 2013, etc.) offers raw, breathing portraits of human fallibility as well as a searingly candid look at her own life: her radical evolution since reading Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Live from Death Row as a biracial teenager growing up in a small town and her early development of a “mass of contradictions and complexities: colors that clash and fight for dominance.” Through a newspaper advertisement, the then-15-year-old author befriended Kakamia Jahad Imarisha, a white Puerto Rican youth originally from Brooklyn, in jail for conspiracy to commit murder. Kakamia had moved with his mother to California in the 1980s and gotten caught up in a contract murder of a friend’s parents, eventually serving 25 years in California prisons. The author and Kakamia became kindred spirits. Imarisha does not sugarcoat the crime, yet her depiction of her adopted brother’s “soul-crushing” despair, his stifling, dangerous, gang-driven life in prison, and redeeming discovery and mastery of art, as well as her own emotionally fraught visits to him, provide a poignant look inside the lives of people we would rather not see or hear about. Similarly, through the account of former hit man Jimmy “Mac” MacElroy, whom she originally interviewed as a journalist, Imarisha records the life of a once-fascinating mobster washed up in his 60s and largely without hope. In between these moving accounts, the author inserts her own story of assault by a boyfriend and eventual abortion in order to grapple with the issues of accountability and forgiveness. She embraces the human side of criminals beyond the statistics (the title derives from the 1938 James Cagney film) and sets forth alternatives to brutal incarceration that involve “transformative justice.”
A brave, honest search for answers regarding incarceration.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84935-174-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: AK Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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