Another entry in the recent wave of drug-policy books by academics. Currie (Sociology and Criminality/UCLA at Berkeley; Dope and Trouble, 1991; Confronting Crime, 1985) begins by observing that the Reagan/Bush war on drugs has failed: Drug use has increased among the poor, although it has fallen off slightly in the middle class. Moving to the ``roots of the drug crisis,'' Currie presents a history of illicit heroin use in America, starting in 1946 (although some might argue that this history really should begin in 1914, with the Harrison Narcotics Act) and concluding that drug use is ``intimately related to conditions of mass social deprivation'' (i.e., poverty). Currie then suggests several models of ``personal meanings of drug abuse'' (the ``status'' model, the ``coping'' model, etc.)—although how this new taxonomy will help is unclear. The author firmly opposes the legalization of drugs, contending that such a move would allow America's profit-oriented companies to ``cause devastation of poor communities by drugs.'' So what to do? Currie advocates reducing penalties for drug use (``saner sentences'' would ``deter more effectively''); sentencing traffickers, not users— an approach another drug-policy analyst, Mark Kleiman (Against Excess, p. 234), calls an ``odd hybrid'' that would swell the black market by freeing buyers from risk but leaving sales in the hands of criminals; and providing serious help for drug abusers within the criminal-justice system. Here, Currie quotes from a California prison commission that found that, besides A.A. and other 12-step programs, no resources exist to deal effectively with drug abusers. ``Therefore,'' the commission states, ``there are virtually no drug-treatment programs in our adult prisons''— a statement that would probably astonish A.A. and N.A. members who have worked, for no pay, with prisoners for 40 years. Much fretting—but not much in the way of new solutions.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8090-8049-4
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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SEEN & HEARD
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