An illuminating, necessary sociological report.
A child welfare activist tells the story of how she went from working with Child Protective Services to advocating for a complete overhaul.
Pryce began interning at CPS shortly after enrolling in a social work master’s degree program at Florida State. At first, she believed her job would simply entail “making sure that kids [were] safe.” When she transitioned into a full-time role as a CPS investigator, however, recurring nightmares hinted that her work was far more problematic than she’d realized. Trauma seemed a built-in part of every case she worked on—and not just because of the parent/child separations CPS often enforced. Families, most of whom were Black, found themselves subjected to processes and procedures that never took into account individual circumstances and sometimes did more harm than good. Determined to find ways to speak on behalf of struggling parents rather than being part of a system that punished them, Pryce went into academia. During that time, she was asked to give expert witness testimony in a CPS court case, where she observed how systemic racism worked against an (ultimately innocent) Black mother named Jatoia. An episode of public domestic violence had caused Jatoia and her husband, Lawrence, to be charged with felony child abuse. Jatoia was fully exonerated after Lawrence confessed to dropping their infant son while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Yet CPS still legally terminated Jatoia’s parental rights. “A realization hit me with nauseating force: The system had more power than I ever knew,” writes the author, who began to work directly with community activists to support parents “reeling” from a white supremacist system bent on policing families rather than helping to rehabilitate them. As compelling as it is humane, Pryce’s book offers timely insight into a racist institution in desperate need of reform.
An illuminating, necessary sociological report.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780063036192
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
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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
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