A welcome contribution to the literature of crime and rehabilitation.
A physician recounts stories from her years at Broadmoor, Britain’s premier psychiatric institution.
Over a working life of more than 30 years, Adshead has served patients at Broadmoor, a place with “a history of housing some of the UK’s most notorious violent criminals.” As in the U.S., mental health facilities in Britain have been starved of funds in recent years, and those violent criminals are shut away instead in ordinary prisons, where they become predators and prey. Writing with Horne, Adshead notes that 70% of prisoners in the U.K. “are estimated to have at least two mental health issues, ranging from depression to substance misuse and addiction or psychosis.” While most people with mental health issues are not criminals, those who are often pose difficulties in securing treatment and taking medications. Before delivering a series of sometimes-discomfiting case studies of serial murder, child abuse, infanticide, and other horrific acts, Adshead observes that nations that have experienced military occupation, such as Norway and Holland, have been the most progressive in treatment of the mentally ill, perhaps because they consider mentally ill criminals to be ill first and criminals second. The protagonists of her case studies would seem to fit this description, though dark passages abound—e.g., an inmate who seemed to be on the path to recovery but committed suicide: “Ian had been unable to come to terms with himself, and in his mind, death became his best or only option.” Adshead’s interest is not lurid, though there are lurid episodes, and her overarching goal is to secure more funding for better treatment. “I wish for my psychiatric great-grandchildren to look back on this period as if revisiting medieval times…[which] did little to help people fix or rediscover their minds, inside and outside of institutions.”
A welcome contribution to the literature of crime and rehabilitation.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982134-79-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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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