An invigorating text ripe with pertinent information about the methods of connection that can lead to real change.
An engaging treatise on the power of communication in social movements, historically and in our current moment.
Pulling together carefully documented research, Beckerman—a New York Times Book Review editor whose 2010 book, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, won both the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize—traces the lineage of how human connection is formed through media, from the 1600s to the present day. Starting in Aix-en-Provence in 1635 with the scientific inquiries of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a little-known but hugely influential polymath, the author explores the story of how humanity has been shaped by the vigorous exchange of personal letters, the efficacy of revolutionary petitions as forms of activism, the proliferation of broadly shared manifestos, and the effects of publications meant to promote self-expression and subvert censorship—e.g., samizdat magazines that circulated around the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s, which were able to “unify the community of dissident artists and writers then increasingly under attack.” Beckerman traces the histories of these movements to show how humans continue to form the significant connections that create important change. Tracking their ups and downs over the decades, the author addresses a wide variety of topics. Most relevant to current issues include the Riot Grrrl zines in the 1990s; how social media influenced the Arab Spring uprisings; growing White supremacist actions in the U.S.; the Black Lives Matter Movement; and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In each chapter, Beckerman dives deep into a particular medium and the methods that did and did not work for the participants of the movements described. With a sharp eye for telling detail, the author uses direct, at times explicit, quotes from primary sources. At times witty, at times cautious, the text is sincere and thoughtful as Beckerman questions what it has meant to form a community in the past and what it means today.
An invigorating text ripe with pertinent information about the methods of connection that can lead to real change.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-524-75918-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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