An eclectic assortment of writings from a longtime participant in America’s protest movements.
Wagner gathers writings from 50 years of activism in this collection of prose and poetry.
While activism that addresses social justice and climate change has helped define our current moment, the practice is hardly new; many people, including the author, have been agitating for policy changes in these areas for decades. With this volume, Wagner collects her writings from a half-century of fighting the good fight, from her high school graduation speech (given in 1970) to reflections written in the aftermath of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Over that time, the “revolution” she was espousing meant many things, including an end to the Vietnam War, equal rights for Black Americans, reproductive rights for women, an end to pollution, and the legalization of marijuana. “The Revolution is not a particular person at all,” writes the author in her prologue. “It is the ever-changing activity of making our voices heard and taking political steps to ensure that those voices acquire the power needed for fundamental change toward a better world.” Wagner details the late-1960s / early-1970s milieu in which she came to political consciousness, a time when so much rebellion was in the air that even a girl like her—raised in a conservative Catholic family on a military base in upstate New York—began to question the status quo. College essays, poems, diary entries, and letters to the editor sit beside retrospective reflections on how the upheavals of the times shaped the author’s life—and how she attempted to shape the times. Together, they chart the evolution of an activist who matures and changes alongside her revolution.
Wagner’s writing is lively and emotive, no matter the genre—her passion and frustration are always apparent on the page. Perhaps the book’s most interesting aspect is how evergreen many of her concerns are. At one point, Wagner vents in her journal, “My despair and dread are over the political climate. The realization that fascism is surrounding me, while I am not able to accept or really see it, because I must live every day…When I must tell people that, believe it or not, this is what is happening. This veneer that ‘all is well’ is frail, thin, easily chipped away” (the event she’s reacting to: President Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984). The poems are mostly of the personal variety, offering glimpses of the author’s excitement and longing related to her romantic life and, later, parenthood. Often, politics still find their way in, as in “May 1986: A Reporter’s Notes”: “The head of emergency planning / For Com Ed’s nuclear plants / Must leave by noon for a CAT scan / His thin torso, fragile hair, sallow skin / And raspy voice give testimony / To the treatments / Fifteen years with the company / Expert in environmental sampling / Exposed to radiation?” While many of these writings can feel dated or insubstantial—unfinished or dashed-off works from particular moments in history—as a whole, they paint an evocative portrait of a life lived in opposition to the status quo.
An eclectic assortment of writings from a longtime participant in America’s protest movements.Pub Date: April 22, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Buried Gems
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.
A New Jersey senator’s moral manifesto.
Booker situates his narrative in the wake of his 2025 record-breaking 25-hour stand on the Senate floor, an act of physical endurance and moral insistence that serves as its animating example. Though not framed as memoir, the episode implicitly positions Booker himself as a model of the virtues he argues are essential to democratic life. Organized around 10 qualities, including agency, vulnerability, truth, perseverance, and grace, the book advances a clear thesis. “In this book, I argue that many Americans who came before us, and many among us today, have consistently proven that virtues are practical: They expand our power, deepen our sense of belonging, and equip us to endure and ultimately prevail.” Booker illustrates this claim through figures such as the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whose willingness to endure sacrifice for principle anchors the book’s moral lineage, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose composure under public scrutiny is presented as an example of dignity as civic strength. These portraits reinforce Booker’s belief that character, sustained over time, can shape public life, even when political outcomes remain uncertain or incomplete. He supplements these examples with personal stories drawn from family, faith, and community, delivered with emotional conviction and a tone that remains affirming and carefully calibrated. Much of the narrative reads like an expansive commencement address, earnest and reassuring, offering moral affirmation at moments when readers might reasonably expect sharper confrontation. That rhetorical choice ultimately defines the book’s limits. Booker acknowledges political conflict and compromise, but rarely examines them in depth, and while urging leaders to take moral risks, he avoids sustained reflection on how some of his own political decisions have tested the virtues he promotes. The result is a principled but self-conscious work that affirms shared values while offering little guidance for navigating power and accountability.
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250436733
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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