Search results | Street Roots

Results

Our indefensible eviction problem

'Evicted' author Matthew Desmond chronicles the struggle to obtain and keep stable housing The government has been telling people the economy is making a steady but slow recovery from the Great Recession. In the past few years, the unemployment ...

7 Jul 2016 - Wayne Braverman
How the U.S. became a country where freedom fails to ring

BOOK REVIEW | James Kilgore explains our dubious grip on freedom in ‘Understanding Mass Incarceration’ The irony of our criminal justice system is that our “land of the free” locks up more of its people than any other country. As such, it’s an outlier in ...

28 Apr 2016 - Mike Wold
President Nobody: No one to fix society’s problems

BOOK REVIEW | ‘The Rule of Nobody’: Philip K. Howard searched for someone but came up empty-handed Take any problem facing our society today,” Philip K. Howard challenges, “and ask yourself, who has the authority to fix it? The answer is nobody.” The cour ...

7 Jan 2016 - Megan Wildhood
Book review: Dorothy Van Soest explores foster care system’s responsibilities, challenges

The novel ‘At the Center’ portrays the vagaries of a bureaucratic system responsible for addressing society’s ills Sixty-year-old Sylvia Jensen is a veteran social worker and supervisor of a crucial program responsible for the placement of vulnerable chil ...

12 Nov 2015 - Joe Martin
Book review: ‘Guantanamo Diary’ is a diary of the damned

The accounts of Gitmo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi reveal brutal – and inefficient – treament It is one thing for the news media to tell us the U.S. government mistreats prisoners at the benignly named Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. It is entirely anothe ...

8 Oct 2015 - Jim Douglas
Re-issued memoirs detail author’s bleak, Irish upbringing

Book review: Martha Long’s “Ma” series shows her genius for storytelling and phenomenal memory for details There are certain expectations that go with genres. A memoir set in Ireland about a girl growing up in poverty evokes the image of lovable alcoholic ...

3 Sep 2015 - Mike Wold
Frederick Douglass' journey to the Emerald Isle

Book review: 'Giant's Causeway' by Tom Chaffin Frederick Douglass is a colossal presence on America’s 19th-century stage. An impressive black man, his electrifying oratory excoriated the injustice of slavery polluting this nation’s avowed a ...

27 Aug 2015 - Joe Martin
Power in the printed word: 'Housekeys not handcuffs'

‘House Keys Not Handcuffs’ is an insightful testimony to the trials and triumphs of the homeless Paul Boden’s “ House Keys Not Handcuffs,” a dramatic and disconcerting book on homeless organizing, art and policy in San Francisco and elsewhere, begins with ...

28 Jul 2015 - Paul Von Blum
Living with death: Book Review: 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty

Author’s argument against capital punishment is compassionate and thought-provoking, but could go deeper If you’re going to put somebody to death for a crime, you’d want to be sure they’d committed it, right? Yet prisoners, guards, chaplains, lawyers and ...

26 Jul 2015 - Mike Wold
Not a drill: Society beyond fossil fuels

Book Review: Growing energy costs will make fossil fuels inviable, Heinberg explains, forcing a societal transformation Book Review: “ Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels ” by Richard Heinberg Let’s face it. We all know we’re in trouble. Last year was ...

14 Jul 2015 - Mike Wold