Though not groundbreaking, a useful reference on a topic that requires continued examination.
An academic study of the police killings of black citizens as “examples of racial hostility, racial bias [and] legalized racial subordination.”
Cobbina (Criminal Justice/Michigan State Univ.) builds her narrative from a mixture of her own observations, interviews with experts, and data gathered through carefully designed research. Throughout, the author emphasizes high-profile deaths caused by law enforcement personnel in Baltimore and suburban St. Louis. Cobbina, a black woman who worried about being the victim of police force during her research, focuses mostly on the police killings of black males, but she also looks at the use of deadly force against black women and men and women of other races. Beginning with an expansive history of racial inequality in America, the author posits that such racism has often led to excessive force used disproportionately against blacks by police. After summarizing the historical context, Cobbina explains how racism, as well as the unique aspects of a specific city, resulted in the Baltimore death of Freddie Gray and the Ferguson, Missouri, death of Michael Brown. The author devotes a chapter to an examination of whether black police officers are more or less likely than white officers to employ deadly force against black males. She concludes that the hiring of additional black police officers often leads to negligible positive impact because it is an overly simplified solution to a deeply complex problem involving poverty, lack of hope for meaningful employment, and other structural factors rarely solved by local governments. In the second part of the book, the author shifts focus from the use of force to protests by citizens in Baltimore and St. Louis. She tries to discern why some individuals join protests despite the risks of police force, why many of those protestors quickly drop active resistance while others persist, and why a portion of despairing citizens never become actively involved. For an academic monograph, the author mostly eschews scholarly jargon while also not relying exclusively on anecdotal accounts.
Though not groundbreaking, a useful reference on a topic that requires continued examination.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4798-7441-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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