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FRACKING THE NEIGHBORHOOD

RELUCTANT ACTIVISTS AND NATURAL GAS DRILLING

Likely to be well-received in the academy and elsewhere largely unread.

A sociologist offers an ethnography of an unlikely group of environmental health activists.

The densely populated Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex sits atop the Barnett Shale, among the world’s most developed sources of natural gas extracted from the sedimentary rock by the controversial method of hydraulic fracturing. Certain residents, believing they have identified harm to the environment and to their own health attributable to fracking, have vigorously opposed the gas companies’ agenda. The threats posed by fracking, the uncommon urban site—hard by schools, homes, and businesses—and the unusual nature of the aggrieved class—white, middle- to upper-class, highly educated, generally conservative—combine in a petri dish examined by Gullion (Sociology/Texas Woman’s Univ.; October Birds: A Novel About Pandemic Influenza, Infection Control, and First Responders, 2014), a self-identified “academic activist.” The best parts of the book are the author’s handy and efficient summations of the long-standing oil and gas culture of Texas, the conflicts stemming from the state’s mineral and surface rights laws, the tangled mess of regulatory agencies with hazy authority over issues of concern, the day-to-day operations at a natural gas site, and the health hazards that may (or may not) be traced to fracking. Embedded among the activists, Gullion embraces “a feminist ethic of co-created knowledge,” and there follows talk of “positionality,” “sexual ecological violence,” natural spaces as “heteronormative,” “epistemic privilege,” science “problematized,” and “performative environmentalism.” This off-putting language, no doubt the occasion for secret handshakes within her discipline, smothers some good stories Gullion has to tell—for example, about activists looking to be the next Erin Brockovich, about eliciting a straight answer from bureaucrats, about the toll constant vigilance imposes—and too often dulls the general reader’s interest.

Likely to be well-received in the academy and elsewhere largely unread.

Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-262-02976-6

Page Count: 216

Publisher: MIT Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2015

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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