Powerfully insightful reading.
An urgent plea for a more humane criminal justice system.
Writing with her former colleague Ramirez, Steinberg notes that being a career public defender has meant protecting “those most vulnerable when the government seeks to take away liberty.” In this book, she explores both her reasons for devoting her life to defending “those people” and stories of clients victimized by the legal system. Steinberg credits her drug-addicted father, a man who cycled in and out of jails and mental institutions, for teaching her the importance of advocating for even the most troubled people “because they never cease to be a human being.” This lesson in compassion helped her with the many difficult cases she encountered throughout her career, like the one involving a Russian Jewish immigrant wrongly charged with sodomy. The apparent heinousness of the crime did not deter Steinberg from getting to know her client, gaining his trust and finding evidence of a forced confession. Though she did not win the case, what she learned prepared her for later encounters with police corruption and brutality. It also laid the groundwork for the Bronx Defenders, which the author founded to train young lawyers how to “put up a real fight, center our clients’ voices, and think about our work through a systemic lens.” Her work with the Defenders, combined with her strongly held feminist beliefs, led her to create what she calls a “holistic defender office” in Oklahoma, which has the highest rate of female incarceration in the U.S. Steinberg’s commitment to reforming a racist, xenophobic, classist, and misogynist criminal justice system is undeniably inspiring, as is her unshakeable faith that “compassion restores our shared humanity,” making us “freer and more authentic.” Her uplifting vision will resonate with social justice reformers and any readers interested in the ongoing fight for justice in a broken system.
Powerfully insightful reading.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593084625
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Optimism Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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