A haunting, inspiring chronicle of fortitude and perseverance.
Moving testimony from a survivor of trauma.
In his riveting debut memoir, lawyer and child welfare advocate Ambroz recounts an early life of poverty, cruelty, and degradation. With his mother suffering from severe mental illness, he and his two older siblings moved from New York City to Albany to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, living on the streets, in shelters, and occasionally in crumbling apartments from which, inevitably, they were evicted. Caught in a cycle of “homelessness, hunger, housing, welfare, and homelessness again,” Ambroz tried to mitigate his mother’s volatility by insulating her from triggers that would set her off. Not least, keeping her stable meant protecting himself and his siblings from countless “inexplicable moment[s] of brutal, casual cruelty.” Besides exposing the “illness, infection, infestation, and unmet needs” that marked his childhood, Ambroz indicts a system of severely inadequate social services. “The system doesn’t trust people in poverty,” he writes, and his desperate pleas for help were ignored: “Over and over again the three of us were left with a woman who was clearly hurting us by people in positions of authority.” When they were removed from their mother, the path to foster placement was fraught with obstacles. Ambroz was considered a special problem: Though he feared outing himself as gay, therapists—and one macho foster father—tried to “fix” him. After temporary housing in a juvenile detention facility and group homes, he was sent to a family that abused and exploited him. One of 450,000 children in foster care, Ambroz managed—with the help of sympathetic supporters and his own fierce determination—to escape the system that threatened to relegate him to the same “slide from poverty to disaster” that dogged his youth. Beginning in high school, as a member of the National Foster Youth Advisory Council, he has worked for meaningful reform, and with this potent memoir, he urges readers to “become one of the changemakers.” The author is now the head of Community Engagement (West) for Amazon.
A haunting, inspiring chronicle of fortitude and perseverance.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-306-90354-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
