Bill Littlefield

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.

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.

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.

Book Review: Charles Dickens — Chronic Liar

January 27, 2024
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The book’s most damaging and embarrassing charge against Charles Dickens: he was a reckless syphilitic who infected his wife and children.

Book Review: “Inside Knowledge” — Prison as Manufactories of Pain

January 2, 2024
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Prison doesn’t “fail” so much as it succeeds at missions nobody in authority wants to acknowledge: punishment, humiliation, and separation from the community beyond the walls

Book Review: “Fallen Angel” — Edgar Allan Poe’s “Black Electricity of Guilt”

December 3, 2023
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Robert Morgan has written a fascinating reconsideration of the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

Book Review: “Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class”

October 17, 2023
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Dan Canon provides not only the statistics but powerful stories to demonstrate the extent to which plea bargaining has bankrupted the justice system

Book Review: “That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It” — Prose & Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions

October 8, 2023
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These essays and poems present incarcerated men and women as nothing more or less than our fellow humans.

Book Review: “American Purgatory” — Prison as a Form of Social Control

September 30, 2023
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“American Purgatory” is the sort of book reactionary politicians and organizations are trying to ban. It’s full of evidence that many of the attitudes and conditions prevalent in this country from its founding were racist, bigoted, even genocidal.

Book Review: “#Say Her Name” — A Collection of Real Life Horror Stories

September 6, 2023
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The brutal, sometimes sickening stories collected in “#SayHerName” are as much about the love, strength, and determination of the women who’ve lost female family members to police violence as they are about the circumstances of the victims themselves.

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