A well-argued case for a better approach to turning young lawbreakers to better paths.
A former teacher in the system recounts different approaches to institutional criminal justice for youth offenders.
Hobbs, the author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, opens with a dispiriting remark from a juvenile hall history teacher who once hoped his students would one day join society as responsible members: “I used to have high hopes for them leaving here and graduating from high school and maybe even college. Now, I mainly just hope that, within five years of leaving, my students aren’t dead. Even if they’re in adult prison, but still alive, I consider that a success.” Some of the young people Hobbs highlights are aspirational, dreaming of going to school and moving away from the cities where they live—and most jailed youth are people of color and poor. As the author shows, well-meaning teachers can do only so much, and most despise the crumbling, ill-equipped system. Meanwhile, those who are incarcerated in what used to be called reform schools resist at every turn, as when one teacher who stressed building a solid resume with a good work ethic was met with one objector: “The kid kept pressing a reasoned case that selling opioids was a valid job by almost every metric except its illegality.” The most successful program Hobbs examines is not jailing but rather a New York diversion program whereby the youthful offenders go to school and, if they last for a month, are paid to do so and then placed in internship programs. This is most definitely the exception; inside most systems, the jailers assume such things as that any inmate “allowed on the internet would immediately begin organizing gang activity.” One stark truth stands out throughout this human book: Too many youthful offenders will one day die in incidents that are “violent, pointless, and painful.”
A well-argued case for a better approach to turning young lawbreakers to better paths.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781982116361
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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