Bill Littlefield

Book Review: “Freeman’s Challenge” — Essential Reading on Prisons, Slavery, and Profit

June 4, 2024
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The prison was the first in the nation specifically designed to generate a profit for everybody but the laborers.

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Book Review: “The Warehouse” — A Visual Primer of America’s Carceral System

June 1, 2024
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The graphics in “The Warehouse” provide clear explanations of a grim reality. The U.S. leads the world at incarcerating its citizens.

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Book Review: “Faraway the Southern Sky” — Portrait of a Young Revolutionary

May 24, 2024
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“Faraway the Southern Sky” is an extraordinary literary achievement because it makes real and present the scuffling life and education of the very young man who grew up to become Ho Chi Minh.

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Book Review: “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis”

May 10, 2024
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The history of U.S. policy on immigration might charitably be described as shameful.

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Book Review: “Get Off My Neck” — How the Judicial System Works, From a Former Insider

April 27, 2024
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Many of the circumstances and particular cases Debbie Hines discusses in “Get Off My Neck” are grim, even sickening. But her experience in the American justice system has taught Hines to choose hope and struggle over despair. And that is encouraging.

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Book Review: “Out of Left Field: A Sportswriter’s Last Word” — Better Than Being an Accountant

April 24, 2024
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Throughout “Out of Left Field,” Stan Isaacs revisits events he covered decades earlier, some of them as significant as the World Series, some of them as silly as frog jumping.

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Book Review: “Witness: An Insider’s Narrative of the Carceral State” — A Voice Worth Heeding

April 17, 2024
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Lyle C. May reminds us that large numbers of men sentenced to death have been exonerated, and that at every level the apparatus of the carceral state is erratic at best and dramatically biased against minorities and the poor.

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Book Review: “Motherlove” — The Desperations of Incarceration

April 9, 2024
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Jean Trounstine’s experience enables her to present convincingly the desperate circumstances of people whose family members have been arrested and incarcerated, sometimes legitimately, often not.

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Book Review: “Shakespeare and Baseball” — Make “Speed to Catch the Tiger”

March 18, 2024
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Professor Crowl’s attachments to both Shakespeare’s plays and the play of the Detroit Tigers are sincere and durable.

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Book Review: “The Jail is Everywhere” — Expansion Plans

February 7, 2024
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The essays in this book are a critical read for folks who might be fighting prison expansion or construction in their neighborhoods.

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