A useful work of scholarship in documenting American lethality.
A collection of academic essays on the American penchant for mass shootings.
Americans commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings, far greater than other societies even where private gun ownership is permitted, such as India and Switzerland. The contributors to this volume, edited by criminal justice professors Madfis and Lankford, seek to understand what elements in American society fuel this murderous streak—which, as one notes, has only grown in recent years, at least in some measure because of the widespread availability of not just guns, but also large capacity magazines. Banning those “may prove a more effective intervention for mass shootings than restrictions on assault weapons.” Whereas it is a popular trope among gun advocates that mental illness is the real issue, as criminologists Jillian Peterson and James Densley write, its symptoms are likely less important than other indicators, such as “stress, unemployment, relationship struggles, violence, and trauma.” Besides, they add, only 5% of violent crimes are committed by “people with serious mental illness.” So who are the shooters? As several contributors provide data points to show, they are often White males who are sexually insecure, have likely been ridiculed or bullied, and have easy access to weapons. Older mass shooters tend to hold White supremacist beliefs, while younger ones are more likely not to be particularly ideological. Whereas “three overlapping groups—gun owners, Republicans, and conservatives” insist that there’s nothing that can be done to stop mass shootings, several of the authors suggest that this isn’t so. For instance, reforming an educational system that reinforces social isolation, bullying, and untreated trauma might “lead the way to a less violent society with far fewer mass shootings and other pathologies.” More immediately, and predictably, many contributors call for stronger measures to restrict the availability of military-grade weapons to civilian buyers.
A useful work of scholarship in documenting American lethality.Pub Date: June 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781439923139
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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