Through a heart-wrenching study of a youth’s murder, Ralph reveals a larger picture of social decay, despair, and violence.
A professor of anthropology delves into the violence and terror on the streets of San Francisco, where real solutions are elusive.
Ralph, the director of Princeton’s Center on Transnational Policing and author of Renegade Dreams and The Torture Letters, tries to find reasons for the increasing gang-related violence in San Francisco via a thorough examination of the death of a young man called Sito, a member of a family with which the author had a connection. Sito was 19 when he was killed, and the murderer was only 17. The motive was revenge for Sito’s peripheral involvement in the murder of the killer’s brother some years before. In his sociological investigation, the author finds a whirlpool of unstable families, conspiracy theories, dysfunctional legal systems, and gang violence with its endless cycles of retribution. Sito was trying to get his life back on course after a spell in juvenile detention, but it was a struggle. A high proportion of the men in this part of San Francisco have been incarcerated at some point, and Ralph traces the legacy of a host of psychological problems that have led to crime. Gang culture reaches into the jails, and a period of incarceration is effectively a badge of honor, so it is hard to see how the pattern can be broken. As a minor, Sito’s killer faces only a few years in juvenile detention, which hardly sounds like justice to Sito’s family. During this project, Ralph was forced to reassess his belief in a variety of liberal reforms, facing "the feeling that my ideals were betraying me.” In the end, he offers no concrete solutions, although he clings to hope and remains “sensitive to the reality that academic research has been—and can still be—exploitative.”
Through a heart-wrenching study of a youth’s murder, Ralph reveals a larger picture of social decay, despair, and violence.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781538740323
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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