A book that provides some brightness, passion, and intelligence in dark times.
An inspiring guidebook for climate activists.
Solnit and Lutunatabua bring together a wide range of like-minded international contributors who provide essays or engage in interviews with the editors. Beginning with a rallying cry, Solnit, who won the Kirkus Prize for her book of essays Call Them by Their True Names, writes that the climate movement has done a lot but “not enough yet.” Mary Annaïse Heglar’s impassioned “Here’s Where You Come In” addresses the need for climate commitment, with each person doing whatever they can. A conversation with oil policy analyst Antonia Jubasz looks at the fossil fuel industry, which “has been suffering death by a thousand cuts for years.” In “A Climate Scientist’s Take on Hope,” Joelle Gergis brings up some stunning statistics—e.g., only 3% of the Earth’s land ecosystems are ecologically intact. The takeaway message is direct and urgent: “What we do over this coming decade is literally a matter of life or death.” Leah Cardamore Stokes points out that by 2021, “more than 85 percent of the new power built that year can run on renewables.” Gloria Walton and Farhana Sultana discuss how our shared solution to climate change must include marginalized communities worldwide. Jade Begay examines the significant climate work being done in Indigenous communities. Renato Redantor Constantino chronicles the important, heated debate among countries at the 2015 Paris Agreement talks. Julian Aguon states a frightening fact: Micronesia “may become uninhabitable as early as 2030” due to rising sea levels. One uplifting fact from “An Extremely Incomplete List of Climate Victories”: In 2010, Germany’s renewable energy generated more than 100 billion kilowatt-hours, 17% of national supply. Jacquelyn Gill writes that the “Earth has left us a roadmap for how to survive the climate crisis,” and Nikayla Jefferson’s piece on the 2021 Hunger Strike for Climate Justice is heart-rending.
A book that provides some brightness, passion, and intelligence in dark times.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781642598971
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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