A well-researched beginner’s guide to a growing movement.
A Jewish journalist introduces the fundamentals of the prison abolition movement.
After a career “covering the criminal legal system as a beat reporter,” Lehman-Ewing wanted to do more than just write about the American carceral system’s many failures. Consequently, she joined the organization All of Us or None of Us, where she wrote “a newspaper amplifying the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated people.” This work put the author in touch with an array of imprisoned artists and activists, including Ivan Kilgore, who funds a successful nonprofit called the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation while behind bars; and Heshima Denham, who suffers solitary confinement and other penalties because of the popularity of his abolitionist writing. Lehman-Ewing’s activism also led her to a variety of prison abolition activists like the members of Critical Resistance, who are leading campaigns to close California’s prisons. The author contextualizes the movement with research about such exploitative practices as forced prison labor and analyses of the oppressive systems that perpetuate the mass incarceration of Black men. “It is not enough to learn how we got here,” writes Lehman-Ewing. “We must start to imagine where we go from here.” The author’s passion for her cause and affection for the individuals she profiles makes this book an excellent introduction to the modern prison abolition movement. However, her nearly exclusive focus on cis-hetero Black male prisoners narrows the text’s focus, making the book feel more like a starting point than a complete resource. In her foreword, activist Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, urges readers to “organize with strategy so that sixty years from now, we will not find ourselves in the same space as we were sixty years ago when my father was alive, simply insisting on liberty and justice for all.”
A well-researched beginner’s guide to a growing movement.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798889840794
Page Count: 284
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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