Progressive activists will want to dog-ear, underline, and pore over this well-conceived handbook.
Two community organizers suggest strategies for advancing progressive agendas.
It’s long been observed that the American left fights battles, while the right fights wars. Wars are won by strategy, and “strategy can be taught, and strategists can get better with practice,” write Bhargava and Luce, who teach at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. One way to get better is to drop assumptions about the moral superiority of one’s cause, abandoning purity of method along the way. It’s hard to forge a united front when there’s a tendency to splinter over the tiniest points of doctrine; when that happens, the “overdogs” win. The civil rights movement is remembered for marches and sit-ins, seemingly impromptu actions, but these were carefully coordinated even as the strategists behind them lobbied legislators, recruited allies, and propagandized to score moral victories. Disruption has its place, the authors write, but so does electoral change, as well as the “momentum model,” which blends action with organization building as organizers “seek out polarizing fights that attract a passionate minority of intense supporters and build a majority of passive support for the cause among the mass public.” Such movements are easily built, relatively speaking, thanks to social media, as was seen with Occupy Wall Street, but more useful still are movements based on mutual care, as with the network that formed around the AIDS epidemic. As the authors argue convincingly, a successful labor movement should step beyond questions of pay and hours and instead examine matters such as structural racism, educating while agitating. The authors close with many pages of workbook-like exercises—e.g., how to build a tenants’ rights network, strategies for reducing homelessness, and how to create a “coalition…between labor, community, faith, and student organizations to fight for a living wage.”
Progressive activists will want to dog-ear, underline, and pore over this well-conceived handbook.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781620978214
Page Count: 480
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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