A meticulously researched rejoinder to the —war on crime.” The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that promotes criminal justice reform, has monitored a literal explosion since 1973 in both incarceration rates and sentencing severity, ironically as real crime rates fluctuated and declined. Assistant director Mauer, a former consultant to the National Institute of Corrections, galvanizes the reader with both detail and directness as he examines closely how this Kafkaesque state of American justice developed and its untenable implications for our future. Mauer explicitly concerns himself with the curious intersections of race and class within this situation, examining the role of social unrest in the 1960s and other factors in conflating various —crime in the streets— scares, which faded as repressive measures directed largely against urban minorities remained, and the ultimately thwarted incarceration reform movement of the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, a good portion of his narrative concerns the —war on drugs— (as in one aptly titled chapter, —Crime as Politics—). Mauer demonstrates the labyrinthine methodology by which antidrug hysteria conceals both a means of underclass social control (particularly in the wake of post-1973 —mandatory minimum— laws) and the constant inflation of corrections and law enforcement spending. Mauer’s exposure of the deep race-based inequities in the prosecution of this war is upsetting and powerful; yet arguably the book is hobbled here by its rather dry and exhaustive approach, which could prove anathema to the readers who most need to consider the injustice and civil rights erosion which they tacitly support. (The book’s array of sophisticated charts, graphs, and footnotes provide a dizzying counterpoint to Mauer’s coolly deliberative prose.) Additionally, Mauer discusses the unintended consequences of maximum incarceration, such as the diversion of law enforcement resources and the disenfranchisement of minority populations through loss of voting rights; he concludes by offering possible new frameworks for thought and modulation within a seemingly intractable problem. Mauer provides a sobering, crucial voice amid the obfuscatory, insensate —tough-on-crime— din.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 1999
ISBN: 1-56584-429-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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