FIGHT TO WIN!

Rousing tales of courageous workers who dared to fight for better, safer jobs.

In this young readers’ version of Fight Like Hell (2022), Kelly leaves out the chapter on activist sex workers and recasts the rest into individual profiles of 22 organizers and advocates. Giants in the great struggle, like Frances Perkins, Mother Jones, Eugene V. Debs (who ran for president from prison in 1920), and Judy Heumann have entries, and she also includes more recent, lesser-known heroes. The subjects are diverse, including people of color, immigrants, and other people from marginalized groups. Kelly chronicles their triumphs and tragedies and their relentless battles with largely faceless, uniformly hostile bosses. Her rhetoric often takes a fiery turn: “I could feel the heat roll off her words,” she writes about an interview with Jennifer Bates, one of the leaders in a bitter, ongoing struggle against “Jeff Bezos’s goons” to unionize the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Still, she reminds readers that her most iconic subjects were complex, fallible humans, acknowledging Bayard Rustin’s support for the war in Vietnam, for example, or how César Chávez and Dolores Huerta froze their longtime co-worker Maria Moreno out of the United Farm Workers. A passionate read that would pair well with J. Albert Mann’s Shift Happens (2024), Kelly’s central message shines through. “Collective working-class power is behind every step forward this country has made.”

Fiercely partisan, rich in role models.