A deeply researched, profoundly optimistic vision for a police-free future.
A Black scholar imagines a world without police.
Growing up in the Bronx, McHarris learned early in life that, despite their purported responsibility to promote public safety, the police were actually a danger to him and his Black friends and family. “I’ve been trying to avoid the police for as long as I can remember,” he writes. This lifelong tendency to avoid police, as well as his extensive research for his dissertation for his doctorate in sociology and African American studies at Yale, led to his ability to imagine—and his commitment to advocate for—a society without police. McHarris begins his abolitionist argument with a short history of the American police force, connecting its origins to slave patrols, anti-Asian and anti-Mexican sentiments, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. After thoroughly uncovering this deplorable history, the author traces the evolution of the police into its modern form, which evolved from the Reagan era war on drugs and continued with then-senator Biden’s racist 1994 crime act. Crucially, McHarris describes these developments alongside alternatives to policing, ranging from modern movements in Miami, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia to historical movements like the “copwatch patrols” instituted by the Black Panthers. In the final section of the book, McHarris gets imaginative about what it might be like to live in a world without police, emphasizing that, in every community, safety is contingent on an equitable distribution of resources. “It’s fundamentally a question of prioritizing lives and people over property and capital,” he writes. The author’s impressive expertise is matched only by his passion for his subject and commitment to radical imagination. While the text is occasionally repetitive, this is a compassionate, comprehensive, and practical guide to envisioning and creating a world free from the oppression and violence caused by police.
A deeply researched, profoundly optimistic vision for a police-free future.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781538725665
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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