An important snapshot of the sorry effect of the housing crisis on the environment and society.
Unsettling look at how housing in America amplifies inequality downward, conveying privilege to corporate landlords and misery to the working poor.
Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, returns to the geography of an earlier book about Disney’s planned town Celebration, in central Florida. As Celebration aged into unanticipated crises, the housing in the region has become ever more problematic. “Variants of this affliction had spread all across working-class Osceola County,” he writes, “soon to be pinpointed as the place with the least amount of affordable low-income housing per capita in the entire United States.” The author notes how many workers in the tourism industry are hard-pressed to find affordable housing or are already homeless, living in dilapidated motels or forest encampments. He first examines the long shadow of the 2008 housing bubble, pointing out that while homeowners were not bailed out, private equity firms snapped up numerous foreclosures, leading to increased rents and mismanagement. Even Disney sold Celebration’s downtown to a venture capital firm with “no record of managing town centers nor any vested interest in maintaining the high maintenance standards set by the brand-conscious developer.” Ross emphasizes the human cost, chronicling his interactions with countless individuals barely holding on to shelter. The author contrasts the working-class desperation of the motel district with the growth of posh short-term rental homes for the affluent. “The motel owners are an easy target,” he writes, “but it would be a mistake to think that the growth of vacation homes is disconnected from the housing distress further along the corridor” Although sections dealing with the predatory economics of the housing market can be dry, the author’s focus on details of place and real peoples’ lives makes for poignant, engaging reading, punctuating the conclusion that “alternatives to the market delivery model for housing are desperately needed.”
An important snapshot of the sorry effect of the housing crisis on the environment and society.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-80422-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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