A serious plan that needs refinement more than invective.
A specific plan to address humanity’s “greatest existential crisis ever.”
With the global mean temperature steadily rising and opposition based on ideology over evidence, a steady stream of writing and conferences proposes to fix matters. Although some national leaders support action, they are not responding to pressure from any major movement because none exists—so, with rare exceptions, the end result has been mere rhetoric. Although it has yet to gather mass support, one political movement proposes to eliminate fossil fuels along with the supportive driving forces of climate change, including deforestation, industrial agriculture, and food and land waste. Known as the Global Green New Deal, its goal is to eliminate greenhouse emissions by 2050 and invest massively to raise energy efficiency and expand clean energy sources. As the name “new deal” implies, it aims to accomplish this without joblessness and economic insecurity and to raise living standards for working people and the poor throughout the world. The concise narrative is laid out as an interview in which Chomsky and Pollin alternatively respond to questions. Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts and co-founder of its Political Economic Research Institute, concentrates on the evidence for climate change and details of the legislation and finances required for the GGND, which seem surprisingly attainable despite the political difficulties he admits are considerable. Chomsky, longtime activist and emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT, concentrates a fierce attack on the culprit: a heartless, obsessively profit-oriented capitalist system that has prevailed for more than four decades. The GGND, which requires all governments to cooperate to eliminate the powerful fossil fuel industry while simultaneously eradicating poverty, has attracted sneers aplenty. Nonetheless, its architects are convincing about the necessity of such a program. What is lacking is a thoughtful discussion by influential—rather than merely intelligent—people on preventing catastrophe.
A serious plan that needs refinement more than invective.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78873-985-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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