A mixed bag of longueurs and profundities that should prove useful to students of the judicial system.
A meditation on crime, punishment, and heartache.
Blake began her legal career working for the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. The work was depressing, and after Sandy Hook and the subsequent defeat of gun-control measures in Congress, she “lost hope.” A couple of years earlier, a 16-year-old cousin of hers suffered a psychotic episode and savagely killed a young boy, a horrific act that received little publicity because of the explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon. “When the worst happens, the notion of luck takes on strange significance. What’s lucky when your son murders another mother’s son? That there is oil spilling into the ocean,” she writes. The best part of Blake’s book explores the trajectory of the crime, subsequent trial, and imprisonment of her cousin, who has been spending his life behind bars incessantly reading and teaching Bible classes while wrestling with his crime. Meaningfully, after reading Crime and Punishment, he described his crime by saying that he “took Ryan’s choices away.” Were the memoir to stick to this story, it would have been more effective, for much of it is given over to hit-or-miss meditations on heartbreak, lost love, and the like, with references to and quotations from a canon ranging from Ice Age cave paintings to the socially conscious journalism of Rebecca Solnit. Sometimes these musings are weighty (“Complicated grief is complicated because it doesn’t change shape or size; it stays unlivable”), sometimes mere soufflés: “Heartbreak’s popularity in times of great taking reveals the essence of a broken heart—what it is to have and then not have.” One wishes the author had directed her energies to the crime and how it played out; in those sections, her writing shines.
A mixed bag of longueurs and profundities that should prove useful to students of the judicial system.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-53852-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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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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
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