A provocative and insightful look to the past for solutions to enhance and survive the future.
Learning from queer history.
Ensor, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin, examines the correlation between climate degradation and environmental futures and how the enduring qualities of the queer community have enabled its resistance and survival across decades of turmoil and demonization. Her primary concern is the future and the sustainability of humankind amid environmental deterioration beneath an increasing limitation of critical resources. With an academic’s eye, Ensor juxtaposes dire “futurelessness” scenarios encountered and eventually surmounted by the queer community and contrasts them against deteriorating conditions within our modern world in order to gain a deeper understanding into methods of repair. She focuses on two particular historical periods and their inherent literature: the 1890s, which saw “the birth of the homosexual ‘as a species,’” and the 1980s, when the global LGBTQ+ population confronted “extinction events” and was threatened and then decimated to great degrees. Yet, she notes, as patchworked communities, they became resilient enough to overcome terminal circumstances and, somehow, thrive. To Ensor, these lessons can be applied to more modern and troubling instances with regard to environmental cataclysms such as nuclear disasters or when considering the “futurelessness” of a global pandemic. The author draws inspiration from exploring the intricate choreography and “urban intimacies” of gay cruising and from “queer extinction” texts by Willa Cather, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Monette, poet Melvin Dixon, and many others, and she is consistently and dramatically informed by vast archives of AIDS literature. Ensor’s prose is scholarly, so much of the text is best suited to a more academic readership. Despite this, her message remains vivid as she effectively speculates on how the future of environmentalism and humanity in general can benefit from intensively and thoughtfully probing episodes of queer pain, struggle, resistance, and resurgence.
A provocative and insightful look to the past for solutions to enhance and survive the future.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781479829477
Page Count: 280
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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