Buffs of buried-treasure and long-ago true-crime tales will enjoy Preston’s expertly woven tales.
More adventure journalism from the noted thriller author.
As Preston, author of The Lost City of the Monkey God, writes in an engaging introduction, “I could never have become a novelist without first being a nonfiction journalist”—or a childhood reader of adventure tales, including one about the presumed pirate booty buried on Nova Scotia’s Oak Island. The author remembered that particular yarn as a grownup, traveled there, and wrote a story for Smithsonian that was “the most popular [article] the magazine had ever published.” His story, like many included here, turns up more questions than answers, but it’s worth noting that it also spawned a long-running reality-TV series that, if nothing else, speaks to our fascination with all things buried. One piece centers on the so-called Monster of Florence, whose brutal crimes Preston tracks long after the fact, confident that he could reveal the true story behind them, only to conclude, “Any crime novel, to be successful, must contain certain basic elements: there must be a motive; evidence; a trail of clues; and a process of discovery that leads, one way or another, to a conclusion,” adding, “life…is not so tidy.” Among the assorted untidy puzzles is the twisted tale of Kennewick Man, a skeleton that turned up in an eroding Washington riverbank and that touched off a huge controversy when its DNA suggested ancient European origins. It’s one of several archaeology-based pieces that deal with similar controversies: whether the possibility that cannibalism may have taken place in the ancient Southwest (with the ghoulish problem one archaeologist faced: “he needed a way to identify human tissue that had passed through the digestive system of another human being”), or why hundreds of skeletons were found at a lake high in the Himalayas.
Buffs of buried-treasure and long-ago true-crime tales will enjoy Preston’s expertly woven tales.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781538741221
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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