An unlikely criminal-justice pioneer revisits his innovative, immensely successful crusade against youth homicide in America's worst neighborhoods.
Kennedy (Criminal Justice/John Jay Coll.) didn't set out to dedicate his career to crime, much less the seemingly insurmountable problem of gang-and-drug related violence plaguing America's cities and stumping even the most seasoned law-enforcement units. Rather, as an aspiring writer straight out of college, he took a job constructing teaching cases for Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. An early assignment on problem-oriented policing sent him to Los Angeles' beleaguered Watts neighborhood, one of many hit hard by the 1980s crack epidemic. Kennedy was struck by the devastating violence he witnessed and, as he plunged further into researching the problem, the horrifying trends it represented. Quickly, a few things became clear. First, guns, drugs and gangs held the keys to the downward spiral. Second, in a shockingly optimistic and humane perspective, that the real problem was, in essence, a massive misunderstanding; that is, that cops and communities wanted, at the base level, the same things, and could be brought together to work toward them. Kennedy and a few key colleagues launched what became known as the Boston Miracle (a name not sanctioned by Kennedy, who emphasized that hard work, rather than divine intervention, created the results). With a massive communication effort, including an astonishing set of forum meetings which actually brought gang members and police officers together, Kennedy's team made clear to the community their goal of stopping violence and valuing the young lives that had previously gone unnoticed. Results were swift and unprecedented—youth homicide rates halved, then quartered, and broad changes were made to communities. More importantly, the solution was not specific to Boston. Over the years, Kennedy has cloned his experiment in cities across the country, from smaller communities like Stockton, Calif., to, with significantly more effort and issues, meccas of urban blight like Baltimore. The problem has in no way been eliminated—and Kennedy emphasizes the drastic consequences when the programs falter—but progress is undeniable. A valuable text—not just for the solution, but also for the refreshing philosophy behind it.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-264-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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