An excellent introduction to the power of public dissent.
A look at how activism has changed the world.
Activists Leonard and Carothers’ book, published by the politically engaged retailer Patagonia, is, they write, an invitation “to defend the right to protest as a foundation of civil society” and “to step forward and experience for yourself the formidable power of protest.” The book chronicles more than 40 protests throughout history, beginning in 1738 with Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay’s pioneering and theatrical tactics to demonstrate against slavery. The authors write about some of history’s most recognizable protests: the Boston Tea Party, Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt March, and Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem. But more interesting are the demonstrations that readers might not have heard about, including San Francisco’s 504 Sit-In—a 1977 watershed moment for the disability rights movement—and the 1991 installation of a giant condom on U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms’ house to protest the North Carolina Republican’s virulently homophobic positions. Interspersed are essays from activists, including Jane Fonda, Dolores Huerta, and Rebecca Solnit; particularly moving is one by Indigenous activist Nemonte Nenquimo, who writes, “The dominant civilization today values the oil and gold underneath our forest more than our knowledge, our stories and songs, more than our connection to the land and community, more than us as a people.” An afterword by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich brings the message home to the modern day: “Resistance is more important now than ever….Tyrants cannot succeed where people refuse to submit to them.” The book is beautifully illustrated with photographs from protests around the world, and Leonard and Carothers do a great job explaining why each action they write about deserves to be remembered and replicated. This would be a perfect introduction to protesting for budding activists, but those who have been involved with social justice movements will find much to love, as well.
An excellent introduction to the power of public dissent.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781952338335
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Patagonia
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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