A damning indictment of the senseless and seemingly unceasing violence committed by those charged with serving the public.
In four equally compelling parts, an anthropology professor breaks down the root causes and severe consequences of police violence against people of color in America.
Ralph (Anthropology/Princeton Univ.; Renegade Dreams: Living With Injury in Gangland Chicago, 2014) adopts a personal take on police violence, framing his research and takeaways in open letters to individuals, among them future mayors of Chicago, two random schoolchildren, people who have been tortured and even killed while in police custody, and readers of this book. The epistolary narrative might seem like a bit of a gimmick, but the result is oddly moving, giving context to Ralph’s subject while lending an emotional heft a more scholarly work might have lacked. In one segment of “An Open letter to Chicago’s Youth of Color,” he writes, “You don’t know me. But I know you; or rather, I know what can happen to you. I am writing to all of you because you are the next generation who has to fear violence from the same people who are tasked with protecting you and serving you.” While the author doesn’t always go into specific detail, he writes in the introduction, “between 1972 and 1991, approximately 125 African American suspects were tortured by police officers in Chicago.” Many of the narrative elements that Ralph chooses to highlight are chilling, most significantly “the torture tree,” borrowed from Billie Holiday’s eerie version of the song “Strange Fruit; and “the black box,” an electrical torture device used to send shocks through a person’s body as punishment or to coerce a false confession. From Francis Grayson, who was executed in the electric chair in 1951, to Dominique “Damo” Franklin, who died in 2014 after being tasered three times, hitting his head on a pole, and falling into a coma, Ralph brings necessary light to the problem of police torture.
A damning indictment of the senseless and seemingly unceasing violence committed by those charged with serving the public.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-226-65009-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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