Urgent, sobering reading.
Envisioning the planet’s dire future.
Writer, humorist, and longtime activist Boyd describes himself as a “tragic optimist,” “can-do pessimist,” and “compassionate nihilist” when he considers efforts to reverse or mitigate environmental devastation. His “can-do” spirit led to his joining many activist groups and launching the Climate Clock, which “counts down the time remaining to prevent global warming rising above 1.5°C (currently six and a half years and closing), while simultaneously tracking our progress on key solution pathways (renewable energy, Indigenous land sovereignty, and others).” Realizing, though, that others may be so overcome with despair that activism seems futile, he offers this book as “a small head start on the grieving process—and some help answering the question, What is still worth doing?” An appendix lists nearly 40 organizations with which readers can engage. Boyd includes interviews with eight “hopers and doomers,” including Robin Wall Kimmerer, who explain their responses to the crisis. Climate scientist Guy McPherson predicts human extinction; eco-Buddhist Joanna Macy entitled her book Active Hope. Gopal Dayaneni, co-founder of the think tank Movement Generation, debunks the “Green scenario” because it “allows us to indulge the fiction that we can technologically innovate our way out of the crisis; that progress is inevitable.” Psychoanalyst Jamey Hecht believes it is possible “to know the worst and still be happy.” Boyd cautiously concurs: “While it’s too late to prevent catastrophe, if we step up our game, we can still build a new, more decent society on the ashes of the old.” All of the author’s evidence points to the inadequacy of capitalism and politics. Individual actions—recycling, a plant-based diet, biking and walking rather than driving—are not useless, but community is crucial for meaningful change. “We not only have the capacity to transform the world towards greater equity, justice, diversity, and integrity,” Gopal tells Boyd, but “if you look around, you’ll see that we are actually exercising that capacity everywhere.”
Urgent, sobering reading.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780865719835
Page Count: 416
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.
Essays on current political topics by a high-profile actor and activist.
Milano explains in an introduction that she began writing this uneven collection while dealing with a severe case of Covid-19 and suffering from "persistent brain fog.” In the first essay, "On Being Unapologetically Fucked Up,” the author begins by fuming over a February 2019 incident in which she compared MAGA caps worn by high school kids to KKK hoods. She then runs through a grab bag of flash-point news items (police shootings, border crimes, sexual predators in government), deploying the F-bomb with abandon and concluding, "What I know is that fucked up is as fundamental a state of the world as night and day. But I know there is better. I know that ‘less fucked up’ is a state we can live in.” The second essay, "Believe Women," discusses Milano’s seminal role in the MeToo movement; unfortunately, it is similarly conversational in tone and predictable in content. One of the few truly personal essays, "David," about the author's marriage, refutes the old saw about love meaning never having to say you're sorry, replacing it with "Love means you can suggest a national sex strike and your husband doesn't run away screaming." Milano assumes, perhaps rightly, that her audience is composed of followers and fans; perhaps these readers will know what she is talking about in the seemingly allegorical "By Any Other Name," about her bad experience with a certain rosebush. "Holy shit, giving birth sucked," begins one essay. "Words are weird, right?" begins the next. "Welp, this is going to piss some of you off. Hang in there," opens a screed about cancel culture—though she’s entirely correct that “it’s childish, divisive, conceited, and Trumpian to its core.” By the end, however, Milano's intelligence, compassion, integrity, and endurance somewhat compensate for her lack of literary polish.
The choir is sure to enjoy this impassioned preaching on familiar progressive themes.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18329-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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