A well-researched, insightful case for the redemptive power of healing.
A scholar explores the connections between childhood trauma and youth crime in this nonfiction work.
In 2015, Smith joined a small team of advocates and lawyers who traveled to California prisons to provide workshops related to a new state parole process for incarcerated people whose crimes had been committed before they turned 18. The author’s role with the group took her to Pelican Bay State Prison, where she would facilitate small group discussions that taught prisoners how to “develop insight into their crimes and the factors that might have played a part in their criminal behavior.” Careful to emphasize that the purpose of these sessions was not to make excuses but rather to find explanations for criminality, Smith hoped the meetings would lead to the important but difficult self-examination needed to help offenders change their behaviors and seek rehabilitation. Those initial visits to Pelican Bay were the genesis of this book, which draws on interviews with 29 inmates who had been convicted as youths. The author does not obfuscate the appalling crimes, including murder, committed by those she interviewed, yet, to a person, she asserts that her subjects were “both perpetrators and victims” of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that defined their formative years. Shawn, for example, was born to a mentally ill woman who had been raped by an orderly in her treatment institution. After being separated from his physically abusive mother as a 13-month-old, Shawn would spend years enduring bullying, malnutrition, and sexual abuse in foster care, and he would eventually stab a man who had preyed upon him to death. Each of the interviewees have stories as harrowing as Shawn’s, which makes the book an often-difficult read—but what stands out amid the work’s gory, trauma-filled details is Smith’s insistence on the “shared humanity” of each interviewee.
The book’s narratives are compelling and are balanced by the author’s expert analysis. A retired clinical professor and associate dean of the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, Smith is also the former chair of the L.A. County Commission for Children and Families. Her professional bona fides give the work authority, as does a multipage scholarly references section. Smith follows best practices in social and behavioral sciences by providing detailed explanations of her interview protocols and data tables of evidence collected in her interviews. She also offers poignant reflections on methodological issues rarely discussed in detached academic studies; she highlights the contrast between her own background as a middle-class white Jewish woman with the Black and Hispanic backgrounds of her hypermasculine interviewees, and she’s candid about how differences in race and gender affected her meetings (she also shares her personal history as an activist whose parents narrowly escaped Nazi Germany). The book concludes with a chapter-length exploration of the ways in which the author’s findings can provide a “Path to Healing.” Early intervention for children with ACEs is highlighted, but for those who have already committed crimes, Smith offers a path toward “accountability, freedom, and reparative acts” that reveal “the resilience and transcendent power of the human spirit.”
A well-researched, insightful case for the redemptive power of healing.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798881802035
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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