Though occasionally dry, this sincere exposé of wrongdoing will appeal to readers interested in social justice, court reform...
An investigative journalist uncovers the greed and disregard for liberty at the heart of a judicial scandal that had lasting repercussions for children in Pennsylvania.
Between 2003 and 2008, Judge Mark A. Ciavarella sentenced thousands of adolescents, many of them first-time offenders, to for-profit treatment centers, often without informing them of their right to counsel. Many in the conservative community not only accepted such mistreatment of juveniles; they wholeheartedly endorsed it. They regarded Ciavarella and his cohorts in the Luzerne County Courthouse as old-fashioned advocates for tough love and zero tolerance. Probation officers, teachers, police and public defenders deferred to a bullying judge who handed down one-size-fits-all sentences while distraught parents watched their children taken away in shackles for minor infractions. Only when a local fraud examiner expressed concern that the judge was taking kickbacks from the treatment centers was a full investigation launched. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ecenbarger (Walkin’ the Line: A Journey from Past to Present Along the Mason-Dixon, 2000) details the travesty from several different perspectives: the juveniles and their parents, the corrupt judge and his cronies, and the officials who brought the case to trial. He also discusses the plight of victims of juvenile misconduct, including a woman who was robbed and beaten by four teenagers; when a judge ruled to expunge the records of all juveniles who appeared before Ciavarella during this period, some dangerous delinquents received a clean slate. Ecenbarger effectively exposes the gray areas of justice and makes a convincing case for why juveniles, even those who commit violent acts, deserve to receive fair trials. He also highlights the pioneering work of Philadelphia’s Juvenile Law Center, a nonprofit that played a significant role in ensuring that justice finally prevailed: Ciavarella was convicted on 12 counts of racketeering and money laundering, and he was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
Though occasionally dry, this sincere exposé of wrongdoing will appeal to readers interested in social justice, court reform and children’s rights.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59558-684-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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