Book Review: Assassin of youth: A kaleidoscopic history of Harry J. Anslinger’s war on drugs

• Author: Tom Ellis
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567717733786
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Review

Book Review

Chasin, A. (2016).

Assassin of youth: A kaleidoscopic history of Harry J. Anslinger’s war on drugs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

1–346 pp. $35.00, ISBN 13: 978-0-226-27697-7.

Reviewed by: Tom Ellis, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United

Kingdom

DOI: 10.1177/1057567717733786

This book reads as an energetic postmodernist romp through its topic and therefore offers a relatively

unusual approach compared to most academic criminal justice or journalistic/popular texts. Not

surprising given that Chasin is a professor of literary studies, writing both fiction and nonfiction.

This has been recognized and appreciated on the sleeve notes by none less than Jonathan Safran Foer

and Robin Hemley. However, for this review, I ask whether the book’s kaleidoscopic’ approach

effectively transmits the author’s intent to the criminal justice reader. From a social science per-

spective, Assassins feels like an extended polemic with sparse referencing and little attempt to

provide a balanced argument. However, the author is clear that this is not her intent, and it may

be that I am not able to move far enough out of my discipline’s curmudgeonly groove. I suppose the

question is then who is it written for?: those who are already familiar with existing work on the topic;

or those seeking a postmodern literary polemic against the war on drugs with little need of follow up

materials.

For the first group, there is little systematic debate about the (anti)epistemological approach

taken, while the latter group is likely to be put off by the constant allusions to sources and concepts

they are expected to know about already (see, e.g., the willfully vague use of the seemingly minor

term le cafard, p. 117). These are recognizably standard criticisms of most postmodernist

accounts, which rely on unexplained allusions and on the verbal and symbolic, rather than evi-

dence, as a form of subversion and resistance. Chasin clearly expects the work to be read on these

terms, however esoteric.

Assassins is written largely in subjective, first-person style and, unsurprisingly, draws on many

assumed (but mostly not cited) cultural and disciplinary references, for example, Homer’s Odys-

seus and Lotus Eaters (both Greek classical and James Joyce nonlinear varieties), and “standard”

narrative approaches, including juxtaposition, speculation, metonymic associations, and so on (p.

10). Chasin’s mission is clearest in her heading-rich prologue (p. 10) where she sees the role of

“multiple Marthas” as mounting a“defense of speculative history ...veering perilously close to

fiction.” Indeed, she admits that her “prose”or“prolix”“is squirrelly, spirally, circular ...as a

pushback against the requirements of linear argumentation” (p. 11 ). This is offered in Foucaul-

dian terms of leaking across discipline boundaries and against the rhetoric of “discipline and

punish” (p. 11). The issue for the less specialist reader is whether they wish to move beyond the

issues raised by yet another Martha (Nussbaum, 1999) to engage with Chasin’s approa ch. Many of

the criticisms leveled at postmodern feminist writers by Nussbaum (p. 2) might also be leveled at

Chasin or her genre of writing. Her style can be ponderous and obscure, and “it is dense with

International CriminalJustice Review

2018, Vol. 28(3) 279-280

ª2017 Georgia State University

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