Customer Reviews

Solomon's Sword: Two Families and the Children the State Took Away

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Shapiro applies his first-rate reporting skills to the issue of child neglect and delivers a book full of uncommon insights.

The book came in a very timely manner. I was very pleased because I was on a timeline.

I was disappointed by the decisions of the judges in the LaFlammes case. But the Melton case was different. The reader gets 2 different stories about 2 different scenarios. I was kind of thrown off by the irrelevant stories that shapiro had thrown in. That is the only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars. It would have been a better read if the author would have just stuck to the point of the finalities and decisions of the stories instead of throwing in extra chapters that were kind of irrelevant to the other ones that actually had something to do with the cases mentioned.

Other than that, great book

Well-written with good prose style, but... 1. The two stories the author tells (a thwarted adoption in Connecticut; removal of 19 children from a group of sisters in Chicago) just don't hang together. These two stories have little in common, and the author is awkwadly trying to force them together. 2. The rest of the book is too cosmic -- trying to pigeonhole everything from the feudal system to the Catholic church, and move back and forth between those generalities and the two unrelated stories. 3. Political bias. Well, what can you expect from an author who teaches at Columbia Journalism School (I know, I graduated from there in 1966)? What you get is someone who accepts what Bernardine Dohrn (a convicted criminal) says and then sneers at Newt Gingrich (without, obviously, having ever read anything Mr. Gingrich has had to say on the topic the author writes about). So what we have here is coverage of the spectrum from slightly left of center to way out there in left field. 4. The author WILL NOT come to a conclusion. It's all "on the one hand this, on the other hand that" which gives a surface impression of evenhandedness but in the end is very frustrating. Still, parts of the story are well done -- the Connecticul couple's story is the better written of the two. All in all, worth a look, especially if you're new to this field.