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John Green's Profile
Customer Reviews: 35
Reviewer Rank: 17156
Helpful Votes: 179
Views: 0
Helpful Votes: 0
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Reviews Written by
John Green (Hayward CA USA)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A guide to police reform, November 20, 2007
This book is good on two levels. On one level, it includes excellent story-telling and is just plain interesting to read as a memoir. From beat cop in the dysfunctional San Diego police department to Seattle police chief overseeing the security at the 1999 WTO summit (remember, the protestors won?) this is a page turner.
On a more important level, Norm Stamper provides a lot of valuable insights into police reform. Those cities fortunate enough to have a citizen's review board might take inspiration from Stamper's mostly progressive vision. Those cities without review boards might take inspiration to create some fast from Stamper's chapter-by-chapter accounting of abuse, misuse and incompetent leadership in policing.
The one rock Stamper leaves un-turned is, what is the root of crime in society? Progressive reforms would lead to more effective, less Gestapo management of crime. But folks will have to ask themselves about a society that produces so much physical and sexual violence in the first place...
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Eye-opening call to arms, November 20, 2007
As a high school teacher at a suburban high school, I hadn't grasped the extent of segregation in America's schools today until I read this book. Kozol's documentation of segregation--and its extremely negative educational corollaries--shocked me. Lived experience as a teacher had already made me an advocate for raising taxes and providing all students with access to an exceptional education from K through college. But Kozol rightly reminds us that separate can never be equal no matter the funding level. Desegregation (again) is a major civil rights issue.
My one exception to this excellent book is that Jonathan Kozol draws on the perspective of many leading institutional civil rights figures in liberal groups like the NAACP or in the Congress. But aren't these the same figures that helped divert the energy of the civil rights movement away from confrontational activism and into compromising for a bigger slice of the status quo?
Perhaps it is less a reflection on Kozol that he doesn't include a bigger discussion on teacher unions and radical education activists (though he thanks Rethinking Schools founder Bill Bigelow in his conclusion) than it is a reflection on teachers in America that we aren't politically active enough against this travesty to merit inclusion?
Overall, not only read this book but give a copy to any teacher you know.
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Excellent Children's Story, October 8, 2007
This is a well-written, well-illustrated, compelling children's story about the fraternization of rival soldiers during the First World War. The story of English and German soldiers singing "Silent Night" together in the trenches really humanizes the combatants in war and should lead the reader to question the sacrifice of human life in conflict. (Even older children will find this interesting, as a starting-point for exploring the First World War and other conflicts.)
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Amazing, September 3, 2007
This book is amazing. Its like a handbook for counter-recruiters, i.e. people who go out and speak the truth about the military and its lies. The first third of it is a mind-blowing description of how far the military goes to recruit youth. The second section provides a wealth of suggestions and annecdotes for counter-recruiting. And the last section is all about building people power, which is a sustainable movement that confronts not just the Iraq or Afghan wars, but an imperialist system that regularly uses wars to bully the rest of the world.
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Another World Is Possible, August 14, 2007
In light of the recent U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, this short history of globalization and resistance by Brazilian intellectual Jose Correa Leite proved surprisingly helpful, and at times, inspiring. As a leading organizer of the WSF from the beginning, Correa Leite's analysis is extremely insightful.
Correa Leite begins with the difficult task of summarizing the 20 year era of modern globalization, from 1991 to the present. These are the densest chapters that attempt to describe the economic/political processes which ultimately led to massive rebellions from Seattle to Argentina. From there is the more readable and inspiring history of the global justice movement which produced the World Social Forum--the beautiful "movement of movements".
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Ought to be on a lot more reading lists!, August 10, 2007
Monster Kody Scott, leading gunman of the Eight Tray Gangstas, recounts his gory murders, robberies and exploits as a member of the notorious Crips. A sickening tide of violence visited this man's life in the span of a decade, from gunning down enemy Bloods to facing death at the hands of rival Crips.
Whether you're an at-risk youth or an activist against the system, you need to read Shakur bare his soul to deliver a message about the cycle of violence in South Central, the descent into crack cocaine during the mid-1980s and the city authorities' chronic failure to address the gang warfare through jobs and youth programs instead of a military-style police crackdown.
Its too bad that Shakur doesn't delve deeper into the Black Nationalist ideology that eventually steered him away from his fellow Eight Trays like Crazy De and Lil' Tray. Why not challenge the reader's own beliefs about race and class in America, even if Black Nationalism falls short as a revolutionary approach?
That said, this is just the type of book that ought to make it on a lot more reading lists in America's schools. Almost anyone with a conscience can connect with this book, even if Shakur's life makes you want to scream at the top of your lungs.
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Good ideas, missing ideas, April 22, 2007
This book advocates for a new kind of social justice unionism that goes beyond bread & butter issues (like salaries) to placing teacher unions at the forefront of school reform in order to better serve students.
There are a lot of valid and interesting points raised by various contributors, but the book emphasizes teacher/administrator collaboration on school reform to the detriment of a discussion about building union power in the first place.
How do we put teachers in the driver's seat? How do fight for the decent compensation that many districts still lack? Social justice unionism is based on a weak premise if it isn't based on a militant union willing to go to mat for what's right. (And I whole heartedly agree that our unions, and not private corporations, should be at the forefront of school reform.)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Wonderful!, April 16, 2007
I loved this book, I could barely put it down until I finished. The story-telling is excellent and the vignettes are beautifully done. McBride's autobiography is just really good. His stories about his childhood and his mother's experiences crossing between cultures is a total page turner.
Find out what it was like as a mixed-race family growing up in 1960s New York. Find out what it was like living as a Jewish family in the 1930s Deep South. Enjoy!
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Bush at War
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by Bob Woodward
Edition: Paperback |
| Availability: Currently unavailable |
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Might Have Been the President's Memoirs, April 16, 2007
Bob Woodward could have just as easily ghost-written President Bush's memoirs of the 100 days post-Sept. 11.
There are almost no critical questions asked in this book, no opposing viewpoints presented and very little context provided. These aren't bad qualities in somebody's memoirs--afterall, you want their perspective--but its a dangerous quality in something that purports to be a history of a key moment in the Bush Administration.
At a few particularly disturbing points, Woodward verges on patriotic machismo: "There was a television antenna on top of a small hill in Kabul that had been a favorite target of the Soviets though they had never succeeded in hitting it. The Northern Alliance had also tried and failed. An American jet streaked in and, with one bomb, the antenna was gone. Word spread through the capital: The Americans are going to win, this is over." (p. 312). Wait a minute, am I reading Tom Clancy or an investigative reporter?
Interesting book, but read between the lines & be sure to check out some of Noam Chomsky's or RAWA's writings on Sept. 11th, Afghanistan and the Northern Alliance for a point of view that actually questions the motives and actions of the United States.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Debunks the "terrorism" myth, March 17, 2007
This is the highly readable, true story of the so-called "Molly Maguires": militant Irish American coal miners persecuted by greedy coal miner owners and their allies in government. Set in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, this struggle illustrates the wider conflict between labor and capital in the post-Civil War United States.
Anthony Bimba's sympathetic account is well-researched and debunks the myth that the miners were `terrorists' hell-bent on plunging America into anarchy. The miners sought better pay and more freedom from company control. For this some paid with their lives as private and government harassment culminated in a series of legal lynchings. (More fair than other historians, Bimba actually lets the owners speak for themselves quoting amply from the man who orchestrated much of the companies' anti-labor campaign.)
This book was a major part of the Communist Party's attempts to revise our understanding of American history, in order to highlight the hidden struggles of the working-class towards freedom and correct the conservative bias of contemporary historians.
It may be hard to believe that a short history book written in the 1930s about a fairly obscure labor battle a generation prior would be worth reading today. However, I enjoyed every page of this book and the lessons drawn from that struggle hold a lot of relevance for today's labor movement.
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