A comprehensive look at the motivating factors that caused young adults to sue the government for a better future.
The story of the Juliana v. United States case regarding climate change.
In 2015, three years before Greta Thunberg became a household name, 21 young plaintiffs filed a lawsuit again the U.S. government demanding the “constitutional right to a stable climate. Its charge is that the government’s actions to cause climate change violate their civil rights to life, liberty, and property. Not only that, but also that the government has known about the risks of climate change for decades and persisted in helping to cause it anyway, failing to implement its own plans to regulate greenhouse gases while subsidizing, authorizing, and permitting a fossil fuel energy system that worsens global warming every day.” Environmental journalist van der Voo spent more than a year researching and interviewing these young adults, many of whom are too young to vote, getting the behind-the-scenes moments that explain what they hope to achieve and why they continue to fight despite facing adversity at almost every turn. In this well-paced, conversational narrative, the author shares the youths’ small triumphs and their vast disappointments as the case progressed toward the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and a potential ruling. Throughout, van der Voo includes examples of the variety of issues that drove the diligent work of the plaintiffs and their legal team—e.g., the extreme heat and drought that led to vast forest fires such as the one that destroyed Paradise, California, or the rising sea levels that are affecting residents of the Marshall Islands. For those eager to learn the backstory of the case, the author delivers a solid synopsis, and she also includes enough meaningful human-interest stories to keep the pages turning even when the outcome of the situation is already known.
A comprehensive look at the motivating factors that caused young adults to sue the government for a better future.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60469-998-2
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Timber
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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