A low-key but fascinating view of life behind bars that deserves a wide audience, if only as a deterrent to crime.
Set a thief to catch a thief—or, in this instance, a drug dealer to ferret out a murderer’s secrets.
Keene enjoyed a sterling youth, his parents pillars of the community, himself a football hero and, in early adulthood, the owner of several businesses. “Wherever I stayed,” he writes, “the latest Corvette was always in the driveway, with a crotch rocket and a Harley in the garage and a hot girl in the bedroom.” Fortunately, the rest of the book is better written, doubtless through the agency of veteran journalist Levin (Grand Delusions: The Cosmic Career of John DeLorean, 1983, etc.). Keene owed much of his material success to a friendly, business-savvy sideline as a drug dealer. When the law finally caught up to him, however, an especially vigorous prosecutor saw to it that he earned a ten-year prison term. A year later, the authors recount, that prosecutor came calling with a curious offer, asking Keene to cozy up to a convicted murderer to find out where he had buried one of his victims and secure evidence to link him with some 20 unsolved killings. In exchange, Keene would be released from prison. As Keene eventually learned, that killer, suitably deranged—“Sometimes I dream about killing women,” he told a police interrogator—had more victims to his credit than anyone had yet realized, but getting that information was a challenge, not just because of the legal requirements of the job but also because the killer was cagey. His hatred of the prosecutor helped, and in time Keene was able to gain the killer’s trust, learning of his carefully thought-out methods and getting “a solid confession out of him.”
A low-key but fascinating view of life behind bars that deserves a wide audience, if only as a deterrent to crime.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-55103-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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