edited by Rebecca Solnit & Thelma Young Lutunatabua ; illustrated by David Solnit ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2023
A book that provides some brightness, passion, and intelligence in dark times.
An inspiring guidebook for climate activists.
Solnit and Lutunatabua bring together a wide range of like-minded international contributors who provide essays or engage in interviews with the editors. Beginning with a rallying cry, Solnit, who won the Kirkus Prize for her book of essays Call Them by Their True Names, writes that the climate movement has done a lot but “not enough yet.” Mary Annaïse Heglar’s impassioned “Here’s Where You Come In” addresses the need for climate commitment, with each person doing whatever they can. A conversation with oil policy analyst Antonia Jubasz looks at the fossil fuel industry, which “has been suffering death by a thousand cuts for years.” In “A Climate Scientist’s Take on Hope,” Joelle Gergis brings up some stunning statistics—e.g., only 3% of the Earth’s land ecosystems are ecologically intact. The takeaway message is direct and urgent: “What we do over this coming decade is literally a matter of life or death.” Leah Cardamore Stokes points out that by 2021, “more than 85 percent of the new power built that year can run on renewables.” Gloria Walton and Farhana Sultana discuss how our shared solution to climate change must include marginalized communities worldwide. Jade Begay examines the significant climate work being done in Indigenous communities. Renato Redantor Constantino chronicles the important, heated debate among countries at the 2015 Paris Agreement talks. Julian Aguon states a frightening fact: Micronesia “may become uninhabitable as early as 2030” due to rising sea levels. One uplifting fact from “An Extremely Incomplete List of Climate Victories”: In 2010, Germany’s renewable energy generated more than 100 billion kilowatt-hours, 17% of national supply. Jacquelyn Gill writes that the “Earth has left us a roadmap for how to survive the climate crisis,” and Nikayla Jefferson’s piece on the 2021 Hunger Strike for Climate Justice is heart-rending.
A book that provides some brightness, passion, and intelligence in dark times.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781642598971
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
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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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by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
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