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
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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