An impassioned plea for confining bankruptcy to its core purpose of resolving just debts justly.
An exposé of the racial, class, and corporate biases in the U.S. bankruptcy system.
In her first book, Jacoby, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina, argues that bankruptcy has “fallen short” as a legal tool to provide debt relief for struggling individuals and families. Instead, it “entrenches existing hierarchies and power structures.” Under the federal Bankruptcy Code, individual bankruptcy places onerous demands on filers and tramples on their privacy, with Black filers suffering additional discrimination. The bankruptcy courts are more accommodating to businesses, which the author labels “fake people.” Businesses are able to retain their autonomy, and all debts, unlike for individuals, qualify for cancellation. In municipal bankruptcy filings (such as Detroit recently undertook), the courts favor financial claimants over public services. What most angers Jacoby are organizations such as Purdue Pharma or the Boy Scouts of America, which use the system to resolve civil liabilities resulting from the harm—e.g., opioid addiction, sexual abuse—that they have caused. Many of these filings occur when the organization is not seriously indebted. Such cases deny claimants a voice in the resolution, block them from pursuing civil cases, and grant minimal payments or none at all—“a promise to pay is not money.” Although the legal and administrative detail is at times daunting, Jacoby offers a convincing and mostly accessible assessment of how an ostensibly just system can be manipulated to be decidedly unjust. As for reform, she offers only general recommendations such as prohibiting the use of bankruptcy for litigation management and increasing transparency in corporate and municipal filings. Given the prevalence of personal and business bankruptcies and the ripple effects they induce (job loss, family disruption), this book is deserving of wide readership.
An impassioned plea for confining bankruptcy to its core purpose of resolving just debts justly.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781620977866
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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
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