A convincing case for criminal justice reform that may alienate some readers.
In this nonfiction book, a reformed sex offender argues for better treatment of felons.
As a young adult, Hardy taught Sunday school, served as a deacon at his church, and was a respected figure in his community. Behind this public facade that “fooled my wife, family,” and friends, the author was a “sex addict,” “manipulator,” and soon-to-be convicted sex offender. After a religious conversion in a suicide watch cell soon after his crimes were revealed, Hardy earned a doctorate, served as a peer recovery coach for the Arizona Department of Corrections Sex Offender Education and Treatment Program, and became the author of an annual devotional calendar circulated among thousands of prisoners across the country. In this book, he blends his personal experiences as an abuser, an inmate, and a rehabilitated ex-felon with a wider commentary on Christianity and the criminal justice system. While sharing the stories of victims and emphasizing the “horrific and heinous” nature of sexual assault, the volume challenges the “myth” that sex offenders “cannot change.” By painting sex offenders as “incurable monsters,” society at all levels, from the media to churches, dehumanizes convicts and makes rehabilitation and reform more difficult. Hardy also urges his fellow Christians to place mass incarceration as a “serious ethical issue” on par with abortion, and apply the religion’s principles of “forgiveness, mercy, and love” to convicted criminals. Backed by solid research and more than 250 endnotes, the book delivers an effective case against the status quo of America’s contemporary criminal justice system. This case is presented in an accessible writing style that combines autobiography, anecdotal stories from both victims and perpetrators, and an ample assortment of charts, graphs, and appendix material. With a target audience of evangelical, traditionalist Christians (noting explicitly that it “is not written for unbelievers or for the ‘casual’ Christian”), the volume may offend many readers with its descriptions of gay sexuality as “sodomy” and a “sexually immoral” sin. And conservative readers will likely be challenged by the book’s discussion of the implications of hardline law-and-order policies.
A convincing case for criminal justice reform that may alienate some readers.Pub Date: March 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63751-167-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Cadmus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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