by Charles F. Sabel & David G. Victor ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2022
Of considerable, if specialized, interest to climate activists and policymakers.
A blending of top-down and bottom-up approaches to climate change.
When the world is burning, is there time to change fire engines? Perhaps, write professors Sabel and Victor. The outlook may seem bleak, but new models of cooperation and “effective problem-solving” have been emerging in recent years. Some of these involve government, federal or state (as with California’s aggressive efforts to reduce carbon emissions); some are at the corporate level, generally driven by self-interest and the possibility that new methods of atmospheric decarbonization will yield new profit centers. Among the most effective measures, the authors suggest, are those that leverage local governance and involve the citizens who live on the ground in places where smokestacks are belching emissions or drag chains are deforesting the tropics. The authors deem this blend “experimentalist governance,” adding that changes and innovations will best come from several directions while requiring some sort of coordination. In a meaningful example, they suggest that battling overgrazing on the part of sheep would demand not only agreements on limits set by the shepherds themselves, but also on the possibility of breeding sheep that eat less grass or engineering new kinds of grass as well. This speaks to the authors’ assertion that battling climate change through, say, pollution reduction depends on “destabilizing innovation,” the kind of creative destruction that turned the world from landlines to cellphones. In sometimes-arid prose, the authors examine numerous case studies, including Brazil’s tangled efforts to preserve the Amazonian rainforest even as its developing economy considers it to be “unspoiled land to settle and exploit.” Throughout, they suggest that local people and “small groups of willing innovators” must pitch in to help further “open plurilateral agreements” at the national and international levels.
Of considerable, if specialized, interest to climate activists and policymakers.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-22455-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Matthew Desmond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
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A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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