A revealing treatise that provides ample ammunition for the legalize-it crowd.
An entertaining excursion into the narcotics trade by a one-time practitioner.
Born in the former Soviet Union, Vorobyov landed as a child in “a small boring town in the British countryside that doubles as a film set whenever the BBC want to do a costume drama.” Bored out of his skull, he dabbled in various penny-ante criminal enterprises such as selling pirated DVDs “until everyone discovered the Internet,” which led him to his next gig: selling cocaine and other drugs to his fellow college students, who proved a willing, lucrative market. “Drugs are an easy, low-risk source of tax-free profit,” he writes. “You can scream how it’s wrong all you want, but name another business where you can quadruple your investment over a weekend.” The drug trade in Britain came under the control of various ethnic groups, most notably—and violently—Albanian gangsters. As for the author, he got caught and did a little time but remains defiant in his defense of the enterprise: “I hate it when people say drug dealers don’t work for a living,” he writes. “Your baggies don’t just weigh themselves and fly over to your people’s houses.” Still, weighing the odds and considering how people behind bars turn into their own worst enemies and have a terrible habit of killing themselves, Vorobyov decided to try a different tack: “While I was in jail, I’d figured that I might as well become one of those prison intellectual types: the subversive scholar.” That scholarship meant reading, traveling the globe (“call me Narco Polo”), and chronicling such diverse matters as a drug’s effects on the brain’s dopamine levels, the trade’s contribution to the international economy, and a “war on drugs” that is really a genocide of ethnic minorities in slow motion. His conclusion: One day, that war will end, whereupon he’ll open a cannabis shop named for the judge who sentenced him.
A revealing treatise that provides ample ammunition for the legalize-it crowd.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-27001-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
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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