Book Review: The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Book #126 of 2020:

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

This 2017 tract has a provocative title, but it provides ample data supporting its revolutionary stance. Although not every reader will agree with sociologist Alex S. Vitale’s ultimate conclusion that police systems should be abolished entirely, anyone involved in a discussion of potential reform could benefit from his clear-eyed descriptions of their archaic origins, egregious abuses, and plain ineffectiveness at combating the issues under their modern purview (many of which even wind up exacerbated by departmental action instead). The author punctures our standard conceptions of law enforcement in the simplest of terms, and provides workable alternatives that could take its place over a host of domains. The result is a valuable resource, especially in a time of widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo and willingness to consider nontraditional options.

As of the time of this writing, the publisher has made the ebook available for free download, and I highly recommend checking it out for yourself: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2817-the-end-of-policing

[Content warning for use of the word “transgendered” and some abelism in discussion of mental health issues.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

Book #125 of 2020:

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

I enjoy the middle of this historical fiction piece, but it’s a little slow to start and goes somewhat off the rails by the end. Still, the core of the plot — about the true case of a 17th-century British village whose residents chose to isolate themselves to protect the outside world during a plague outbreak — is well-told, with realistic details and a poignant look at the toll of such sacrifice. The writing bears a few clumsy hallmarks of a debut novel and the storyline isn’t as moving as the author’s later work People of the Book, but it’s overall another solid entry to my growing list of COVID-19 reads.

[Content warning for claustrophobia, gore, domestic abuse, and death of children.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

Book #124 of 2020:

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

The twists in this mystery thriller make it hard to discuss without spoilers, but they don’t always land satisfyingly for me as a reader. There are also some pacing issues about when certain revelations come to light, and a few instances of characters not asking what seem like obvious follow-up questions about the information they’ve been given.

Still, the initial premise is fun — a bookseller gets dragged into the investigation of a serial killer who seems to be copying the deaths from an article he once wrote about the best murders in fiction — and the whole work acts as a sweet love letter to the genre, both celebrating and indulging in its standard conventions. Be aware, though, that the novel does discuss key details from the plots and solutions of many classics (The A. B. C. Murders, Strangers on a Train, Death Trap, The Red House Mystery, Malice Aforethought, Double Indemnity, The Drowner, The Secret History, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, and possibly a few others I’m forgetting), so anyone planning to someday read those other titles may wish to do so before picking up this one.

[Content warning for mention of child molestation.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

Book #123 of 2020:

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

Author Alexander Weinstein has a real talent for thinking up interestingly disturbing sci-fi premises based on new and emerging technologies, like the parents in the title story who have to delete their digital offspring after a malware infection or the couple from “Openness” navigating the appropriate privacy settings for their relationship. Too often, however, the entries in this collection lack that key follow-through of compelling plots and characters set within their imagined tomorrows. I would love to see his work developed with a co-writer or adapted for a series like Black Mirror, but I don’t know that I would seek out anything else from Weinstein alone.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Clique Bait by Ann Valett

Book #122 of 2020:

Clique Bait by Ann Valett

This high school revenge novel is lightweight but fun, playing out vaguely along the lines of Mean Girls (or Hannah Capin’s recent Foul is Fair, minus that book’s heavy-handed Shakespearean conceit). A teenage nobody infiltrates the popular kids with ulterior motives to take them down, gets emotionally compromised by the new relationships she forms there, and must struggle to decide whether she’s doing the right thing after all. There aren’t a whole lot of surprises to the plot — and one late twist feels glaringly obvious from the start, given how the characters keep awkwardly talking around it — but it’s fine as a breezy summer read that glances off a few darker themes.

[Content warning for underage drinking, bullying, peer pressure, revenge porn, and head trauma.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Book #121 of 2020:

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

The idea of a Hunger Games prequel about the young Coriolanus Snow isn’t necessarily a bad one, but I feel like there are three key elements that such a project would need to deliver in order to be successful. Namely, the book should tell us more about the history of the Panem setting, it should tell us more about the future president himself (but without humanizing his later atrocities), and it should be a compelling story in its own right. Unfortunately, this version that author Suzanne Collins has written only comes close to realizing the first of those criteria, and ultimately does little to justify its existence.

Set at and around the 10th Hunger Games, the novel is most interesting for showing a glimpse of how the already-awful contest will become the bloodthirsty spectacle of Katniss’s time, and for featuring characters like the teenage protagonist who have lived through the original rebellion of the series backstory and remember the initial founding of the Games. Yet even there, none of it seems especially revelatory or worth the slog of a dull plotline to learn these minor new details.

Coryo isn’t intended to be a particularly sympathetic figure, and although Collins succeeds at that characterization, it’s hard to care about his calculating careerism or worries about his family’s station when the fascist government to which he aspires is literally slaughtering other children. His falling for the manic pixie dream tribute he’s mentoring could have offered some intrigue if she were merely playing him, but since her returned feelings are apparently genuine, it just reads as exploitative and gross instead. And on a basic plot level, the action is slow and fairly devoid of stakes even after a weird redirection for the last third of the text.

I’m sure this volume will earn its rights-holders another cornucopia of cash, as will the inevitable film adaptation. But I honestly can’t recommend it for any but the most ardent of fans.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Better Call Saul, season 5

TV #19 of 2020:

Better Call Saul, season 5

This is not my favorite run of the Breaking Bad prequel, but it remains a meticulous character study punctuated by electrifying moments of sheer audacity. (I’m not sure I breathed once during the last scene of episode nine, I was so edge.) Everyone this year feels increasingly boxed in by their particular circumstances, and when they do try to break free, they inevitably end up getting smacked down hard by reality. That’s certainly befitting the closing chapters of a prelude to a tragedy, and I’m on tenterhooks to see how everything resolves — especially those enigmatic flash-forwards to life after Albuquerque, and the ultimate fate of original characters like Kim and Nacho — whenever the final season arrives.

The protagonist’s long-delayed embrace of his callous Saul Goodman persona carries the predictable ups and downs, but I think I want just a little more of that traditional Slippin’ Jimmy scheming than is on display here, and less of whatever the writers are doing with Howard Hamlin. Overall this is a somewhat slower stage of the story, and while I trust that it’s setting up for proper fireworks ahead, the here and now feels a tad shortchanged in service of what’s to come. That’s not enough to sink the effort completely, but it’s a little unsatisfying compared to this series at its best.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

Book #120 of 2020:

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #5)

The fifth novella in this loose series about children longing to return to the fantasy worlds they once visited is most similar to the third, featuring a group of the kids again traveling to someone else’s magical realm to help resolve a crisis there. It’s a fine adventure, and I love the scenes where our protagonists prove willing to casually recognize and accept one another’s different preferences/mindsets/etc. even without understanding them. Yet on a macro level, it seems like the overall pathos of these books is weakened with every successful new return journey (and resurrection from the dead), lowering the stakes by making those rare events more commonplace and controllable. I’ve still enjoyed this volume, but it doesn’t feel as consequential as its predecessors or their larger narrative.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner

Book #119 of 2020:

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner

At turns inspirational, eye-opening, and infuriating, activist Judith Heumann’s account of her lifelong fight to enshrine civil rights protections for people with disabilities deserves to be read widely. It’s easy to not think about matters of accessibility that don’t affect you personally, and to take for granted the accommodations that are more commonplace today, but Heumann and her co-author Kristen Joiner swiftly take us into her position and show us the barriers she’s faced at every moment on the way to that slim measure of progress. (Among others: being denied a teaching license, barred from boarding airplanes, and even unable to physically enter many buildings due solely to her use of a wheelchair.)

Writing at age 72, the polio-stricken child of Holocaust survivors shares her story both to preserve history — like how she helped lead the sit-in of a government building to demand passage of Section 504, an important piece of anti-discrimination legislation — and to emphasize how expanding equal access is in the interest of all society. Since anyone could acquire a disability, and since everyone will if we live long enough, it’s in our own self-interest as well as simple justice to demand that equality now. Luckily we have folks like Judy modeling the way to achieve it.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Shameless, season 3

TV #18 of 2020:

Shameless, season 3

As always, I wish I could separate the parts of this series that I like from the ones I really don’t. There’s a compelling family drama here, but it’s generally couched amid so much tasteless shock humor and tedious subplotting that it’s hard for anything to ever land meaningfully. One episode this year, for instance, has Child Protective Services temporarily move the younger Gallagher children into foster homes, forcing oldest sibling Fiona to scramble to prove she can look after them all. At the same time, their neighbor Veronica is recruiting her mom to sleep with her partner as a low-cost infertility solution. Such disparate stories as those barely feel like they belong in the same broad narrative, let alone the same hour of television.

This season does help rehabilitate the character of Fiona’s boyfriend, turning him from a sociopathic jerk into a hapless failure and underscoring why their relationship is flawed in a way that I’m not sure the writers truly recognized before. I still don’t particularly like the guy, but at least now that seems like the result of an intentional creative choice rather than my negative reaction to shenanigans that are apparently instead designed to please. If the show at large could just tweak its formula more in that direction — say by spending less time with deadbeat dad Frank and everyone in his orbit away from the kids — I’d be a much happier viewer.

And hey, credit where credit is due: the last episode of this run ameliorates a lot of my above concerns, keeping most of the more outrageous elements in check and centering the various personal struggles to produce my favorite hour of Shameless yet. With any luck, that becomes the model for the program moving forwards and not just a fluke of a finale.

[Content warning for rape, transphobia, homophobia, conversion therapy, ableism, and slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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