An eye-opening, relevant, and heartbreaking account on the epidemic of criminalized poverty.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist reports on how the American justice system has fallen critically out of balance.
Expanding on his series of columns for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Messenger exposes the widening divide between lawful fairness and the poverty-stricken population in rural Missouri communities. The author scrutinizes the tragic ways judicial systems keep poor citizens in a cycle of jail sentences via overwhelming financial burdens placed on them, from the time of arrest and even after their sentence is served. In many areas, the author notes, municipal budgets are tight. Seeking to counterbalance revenue shortcomings and underfunding, counties depend on court-generated fees, regardless of whether defendants can afford them or not. Messenger movingly profiles three single mothers who share their jailhouse ordeals of being abused by “a judicial process that often serves as a backdoor tax collection system.” Convicted of a misdemeanor shoplifting charge for stealing a tube of mascara, Brooke Bergen went to jail for a year and struggled with a minor parole violation that induced a hefty fine she struggles to pay off. Along with the others Messenger profiles, like a young Oklahoman cited for marijuana possession, Bergen now finds herself at the mercy of an a la carte court fee system, mercilessly “tethered to the judicial system for years.” A tenacious watchdog journalist, the author also reports on a Missouri judge who schedules extrajudicial “payment review hearings” to ensure court costs are collected monthly from defendants who have finished serving their time. When they can’t pay, or miss the hearing, their jail sentences are reinstated. Messenger explains how he was nearly blocked from witnessing Bergen’s public hearings. He closes on a positive note, elaborating on the glimmers of hope in the form of a growing coalition advocating for reform and equality. Victims have begun fighting back with civil rights legislation and litigation against a system so blatantly skewed against poverty-stricken communities.
An eye-opening, relevant, and heartbreaking account on the epidemic of criminalized poverty.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-27464-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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
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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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