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alannah_irwin's review against another edition
5.0
Short book but took a little while longer to finish to capture her ideas! Never meant someone whose life wasn't changed by reading her work. Great interview collection.
kkm0112's review against another edition
5.0
A very good primer on Angela Davis’ background with incarceration and her thoughts on politics and prisons, prisoner torture, and where we go as a country to come to a reckoning on the prison system and our role in international affairs. It’s told in a series of interviews and is a really quick read and pairs well with the Netflix documentary 13th.
jordantwombly's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.0
very informative short read
sanaa's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
5.0
A must read for everyone. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone. The relevance of Davis’ book many years after its publication reveals the lack of critical thinking and discourse to develop in the post-9/11 surveillance police state. Davis has such a profound temperature gauge on the American psyche and of its imperialism through the nation’s past, present, and future. But, most importantly, Davis in her philosophy and examination deeply and relentlessly admits the humanity that binds us all beyond the fabrication of militarized borders and sense of falsely nationalized selves.
leahfrancis's review against another edition
as always, angela davis is accessible and illuminating! this filled in some gaps in my understand of current state (or at least 2005 state) of american empire. I feel like I need to read 800 more books
corinnek's review against another edition
- unrated/non-fiction, re-read -
a very concise summarization of Angela Davis's thoughts on what it means to be a prison abolitionist, and an abolitionist in general. the quote "the challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression" has informed my understanding of identity politics and the limits of representation - and the need for liberational, radical politics, that resist being co-opted into the capitalist scheme - more than anything else.
I think this work is also especially important today (Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison today) because though it is good that the state recognized that George Floyd's death was a crime, it is somewhat of a trap to be too mollified by Chauvin's sentencing. There is more work to be done, and justice will never be given through prison sentences or corporal punishment.
a very concise summarization of Angela Davis's thoughts on what it means to be a prison abolitionist, and an abolitionist in general. the quote "the challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression" has informed my understanding of identity politics and the limits of representation - and the need for liberational, radical politics, that resist being co-opted into the capitalist scheme - more than anything else.
I think this work is also especially important today (Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison today) because though it is good that the state recognized that George Floyd's death was a crime, it is somewhat of a trap to be too mollified by Chauvin's sentencing. There is more work to be done, and justice will never be given through prison sentences or corporal punishment.
angelicagmoyer's review against another edition
3.5
I am still on the waiting list for Are Prisons Obsolete at my library, and I feel like my experience would have been better had I read that first. There were a few transcription errors that got missed it editing, which made some things a bit confusing. Content is great though and still relevant today; it was easy to make connections and see how things have gotten to this point.
shae_316's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.75