A buoyant, historically astute appreciation of political persistence.
The hard work of making a better future.
Readers seeking reasons for hope in tumultuous times will find many in the latest from the author of Men Explain Things to Me. Solnit’s essays about climate change, toxic masculinity, income inequality, and other subjects are paeans to “patience, endurance, and long-term vision,” which she believes are essential to lasting political change. Solnit is a deft connector of historical dots. In one inspired essay, she demonstrates how 21st-century activists organized durable movements that moved centrist politicians toward progressive remedies on problems as varied as water usage and debt relief. Occupy Wall Street, launched in 2011, recognized that theirs would be a protracted fight, one that yielded tangible results in the 2020s, when politicians launched student loan forgiveness initiatives. More than two centuries ago, Solnit notes, John Adams detected a not dissimilar chain of events, writing that the American Revolution “was effected from 1760 to 1775.” Solnit describes climate change as “a moral crisis” and “a storytelling crisis.” Cynics may chuckle when she quotes a climate writer who says that “what we desperately need is more artists” to help create “a new world,” but Solnit offers a galvanizing vision for healing the planet, one that prizes community over material goods. A more humane definition of wealth, she writes, would foreground enriching relationships with nature and friends. This isn’t an autobiographical book, but the personal details Solnit shares suggest a very interesting person. She was “an antinuclear activist” and counts among her friends a death row inmate, a mushroom collector, and a violin maker. The latter appears in the book’s warmest essay, about the durability of a 300-year-old violin still played by a prominent musician. Fittingly, the instrument is “both a relic and a promise.”
A buoyant, historically astute appreciation of political persistence.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798888903636
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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