A distressing, critical study in the understanding, processing, and prevention of mass-casualty gun violence.
Peterson and Densley, both professors of criminology, intensively survey the effects of gun violence via the data-driven prevention group called the Violence Project. In 2018, the authors, who co-founded the project, began anonymously interviewing incarcerated individuals in an effort to illuminate their life histories. Early on, five felons agreed to participate in the uncompensated project, which then expanded outward in interviews with their former and current spouses, family, friends, co-workers, and survivors. Using these interactions, Peterson and Densley sought to garner a more well-rounded perspective of who the shooter is or was and how their personal history shaped them. The result is a bracing compilation of mass shooter profiles and first-person accounts from violent criminals, beginning with the Parkland shooter’s emotional breakdown as he apologized to his brother. This sequence sets the tone for the remaining perpetrators, who are chillingly yet humanely profiled in a multifaceted study that is alternately horrifying, depressing, and even hopeful. The U.S., write the authors “is a lonely island when it comes to mass shootings,” mainly due to the country’s love affair with guns and unrelenting, often misguided, protection of the Second Amendment. (One shooter interviewed not only names the guns in his arsenal; he sleeps with them.) Chronicling the lives of a variety of perpetrators, from mentally distressed school shooters to rampaging extremists, the authors identify many shared attributes and experiences, including childhood trauma, anger, loneliness, societal stressors, and suicidal ideation. Many of these factors serve as propellants for terrible acts of violence, but, as the authors argue convincingly, they also can become integral parts in “unlocking solutions” for personal crisis and trauma intervention across individual, institutional, and societal levels. The authors conclude with holistic, interventional, and tangible strategies for reducing violence in contemporary society.
A distressing, critical study in the understanding, processing, and prevention of mass-casualty gun violence.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5295-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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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