The answer is yes in an argument tinged with plenty of nuance.
A graphic-rich book whose title thesis is asked and answered in a cogent narrative.
Part of the publisher’s Big Idea series, this volume is billed as “a primer for the 21st century.” The idea is big but not, of course, new: Most drugs were largely legal in most parts of the world until relatively recently. As British freelance journalist Busby writes, for instance, opium was widely used in Britain until 1868, popular among the poor “because it was cheaper than gin or wine.” Prohibition and suppression paralleled the rise of the bureaucratic, command-economy state. For example, marijuana was legal in Madagascar until the authorities observed that a ganja-fueled populace wasn’t inclined to work efficiently in the fields. As Busby shows, there’s a racist element to the historic interdiction effort. “Many of the initial prohibitions were at least partly fueled by bigotry,” he writes, “underpinned by fears of foreigners and minority groups, and perceived threats to labor markets.” The war on drugs in the U.S., instituted by the Nixon administration, has been no different: Most consumers are White, but most police actions target non-White people. That war, Busby relates, has chalked up roughly $1 trillion in costs, with an annual expenditure today of about $50 billion. Meanwhile, cartels and their enablers—one of them the HSBC Bank, which “allowed at least $881 billion of Sinaloa cartel drug trafficking money to be laundered through its accounts”—cashed in big. Busby argues that prohibition is a lost cause, an opportunity for politicians to bloviate and gangsters to flourish, and that “it is time for a new, compassionate and pragmatic approach.” Backed by a careful graphic presentation in charts and photographs, that argument calls for legalization, regulation, treatment of the addicted, and other more humane and less costly measures that would have the effect of dismantling the illegal economy.
The answer is yes in an argument tinged with plenty of nuance.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-500-29568-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
