An uplifting book that views some flawed figures through rose-colored glasses.
A heartfelt collection of life lessons inspired by changemakers.
Ghosh, a social impact strategist, combines memoir, biography, and practical advice in this book about the impact that 30 icons, mentors, and family members have made on his approach to service. “Lessons from others not only sustained me but helped me thrive,” he explains. The book opens with a lesson in empathy from his parents, whose generosity inspired the author to start a local community organization to address sanitation issues in the slums of Kolkata, India (Ghosh’s childhood home). The author recalls hearing the Dalai Lama (who contributes this book’s foreword) speak about the importance of showing respect and compassion for low-income citizens as entrepreneurs undertook various development initiatives across the Indian subcontinent and Africa. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg served as a role model of civility for Ghosh, who cites Ginsburg’s friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia as an example of her ability to respect and work with others across ideological lines. After meeting Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai in 2013, the author became inspired to speak out about important issues because she taught him that “silence is not an option.” Ghosh concludes with a touching chapter celebrating his son, Ryan, a young man with an adventurous spirit, the ability to embrace diversity, and a passion for fostering connection. The author’s personable voice will make his high-profile life of hobnobbing with globally renowned figures feel relatable to everyday readers—he describes how Mother Teresa made him feel “completely flooded with utter joy at her love, compassion, mercy, and greatness” with just the touch of her hand. However, the narrative occasionally praises controversial figures like Bill Clinton, about whom Ghosh gushes, “It was impossible not to like this man.” Still, the author’s empathy is evident in lines like, “Poverty is a condition created by a social construction that benefits some and not others. It is not a character flaw or a personal failing.” The text lists resources and organizations in each chapter to help readers engage in their own philanthropic efforts.
An uplifting book that views some flawed figures through rose-colored glasses.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798888459249
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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