Of a decidedly leftist bent, but activists, organizers, and civil libertarians of whatever stripe will want to have a look.
Revolution for the hell of it? Perhaps, this latter-day rejoinder to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals suggests, since revolution of other kinds seems nigh on impossible.
Impossible, perhaps—but still worth trying. Occupy Wall Street co-creator White, a graduate of the Adbusters school of paradigm subversion, is nothing if not optimistic on that point, at least most of the time, even as he candidly assesses past missteps. “Occupy Wall Street was a political miracle,” he writes,” a rupture moment that redefined reality, pushed the limits of possibility and transformed participants into their best and truest selves.” That movement grew from an anti-Starbucks campaign that fizzled—and probably rightly, since Starbucks actually pays its workers a living wage—with “a few insignificant actions that didn’t catch on.” So, given that failure, the ultimate failure of Occupy for all its self-transformation, and the many failures of protest generally, why bother? Because, White assures readers, there’s life in the path to replacing old paradigms with new ones, and if Occupy “failed to live up to its revolutionary potential” and “protest is broken and the people know it worldwide,” that doesn’t mean injustice has taken a holiday. Though the author sounds Leninist at times (“the people must capture legislative and executive control constitutionally and legitimately”), White can be a little theological and even New Age–y, as well (“scour the edges of politics and adapt the protest behaviors that make you excited and a bit nervous”)—all while he looks toward the possibility of carving out new paths of resistance with such things as meme warfare along with the old tried-and-true of satyagraha and sit-down. Fans of Alinsky will find points in common here, but direct-action types will be disappointed to discover that under the revolutionary bluster, this is a rather quietly spiritual treatise and certainly no Anarchist Cookbook.
Of a decidedly leftist bent, but activists, organizers, and civil libertarians of whatever stripe will want to have a look.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-81004-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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