A handbook for aspiring activists that readers will find to be both inspiring and practical.
Daley-Harris details the history of his successful citizens’ lobbyist group and sketches a blueprint for others to follow.
The author’s nonprofit lobbying group, RESULTS, whose name once stood for “Responsibility for Ending Starvation Using Legislation, Trimtabbing, and Support,” was founded in 1980 in Southern California as a small group of friends writing letters to elected officials to help fight poverty and world hunger. Decades later, it’s blossomed into a considerable organization with chapters all over the world, and it’s one that’s been widely recognized for helping to reduce malnutrition and preventable disease with what Daley-Harris calls “transformational advocacy.” As he sees it, his success was a function of this deliberate approach, which he sharply contrasts with that typically practiced by many larger organizations, a strategy that “disempowers the average citizen.” The author distills transformational advocacy into three practical parts, which he articulates with impressive clarity. First, such advocacy requires an organizational structure that provides support for its volunteers with a clarity of mission purpose and a set of high expectations. Second, it features a disciplined plan for outreach that not only produces letters to elected officials and editorials to newspapers, but also cultivates close personal relationships with politicians and journalists. Finally, and most importantly, the author focuses insistently on the empowering value of idealism—the sense that one can truly make a difference: “This idealism includes holding ourselves and our governments accountable to our greatest ideals. If government is broken, we are part of that brokenness and must engage in healing ourselves too.”
Daley-Harris’ approach to explicating transformational advocacy is eclectic. He furnishes a history of his own group, personal testimonials from those who’ve worked within it, and an account of the success of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, the first organization to replicate the specific methodology of RESULTS. The author’s focus is less on limning a conceptual framework to be copied, though, and more on concrete illustrations that show transformational advocacy in action. As a result, this is a thoroughly practical work that could serve as an instructional guidebook for those looking to start their own advocacy group, or who simply wish to become more involved as individuals. Aside from all the practical instruction, including how to become an effective spokesperson, Daley-Harris explains what he sees as the proper mindset of the activist: a psychological comportment that’s unabashedly and cheerfully optimistic and freed from the expectation of failure. In short, he writes, activists must come to see themselves as leaders who are capable of changing things: “With transformational advocacy, volunteers are trained, encouraged, and then succeed at doing things they never thought they could do as advocates—accomplishments like meeting with members of Congress and bringing them on board and enlisting editors to write about their issue—and, as a result…they see themselves as community leaders.” Overall, the author’s analysis of effective action is as persuasive as it is accessible, and his call to democratic participation is inspiring.
A handbook for aspiring activists that readers will find to be both inspiring and practical.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781953943347
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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