A good choice for anyone interested in how troubled neighborhoods are policed and conflicts mediated.
A street-smart sociologist looks at gang warfare in Chicago as a machine that, once set in motion by various forces, is hard to stop.
Intergang turf wars are fueled by many pipelines. In the case of one South Side Chicago neighborhood, one of those pipelines is the willingness, even avidity, of rural folks to sell guns to city kids who drive “downstate” to procure their arsenals. Case in point is a gangster named Harpoon, who in one visit “purchased fifteen used handguns from a rural family that has gathered up the cache from neighbors.” As Venkatesh shows, though, there are other factors. The author writes about one imprisoned drug dealer in particular, who was busted not just for drugs, but for having enough weapons to make the police nervous. Fearing that rival dealers were trying to seize his territory and that his teenage crew on the streets wasn’t tough enough to defend it, he ordered his lieutenant to take down suspected rivals. The lieutenant decided his victim would be a high schooler he had been bullying. Consequently, that kid, hitherto fairly well behaved and nondescript—“Ordinary never got no one in trouble,” his parents have instructed—was pushed into assembling a gang and getting guns for himself. Add to this the jailed dealer’s Machiavellian conclusion that a shooting war would be good precisely because it would bring down the police and keep those rival dealers away for fear of being arrested, and you have the makings of mayhem. The eventual resolution is an unexpected but inspired part of Venkatesh’s ethnography, involving clergy, a peacemaker of a police officer, and not least some of the teenagers who willingly laid down their arms. Even the imprisoned dealer contributed something positive, telling one of them, “If I was you, I’d get the fuck out.”
A good choice for anyone interested in how troubled neighborhoods are policed and conflicts mediated.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9439-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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