An enthusiastic, supportive manifesto to inspire political engagement.
Why and how youth activists can make real political and social changes.
Warren, co-founder and CEO of the national political youth movement Generation Citizen, makes his book debut with a pragmatic, anecdote-filled guide for empowering young people to “improve lives for themselves and for their communities.” High school and college students, as well as young professionals like himself, have the ability “to change the current narrative of our democracy” by becoming “politically active not just on Election Day, but on every single day of the year.” The son of a foreign service officer, by the time he entered college, the author had lived in multiple developing countries, where he had witnessed the “fragile nature” of emerging democracies as well as learning about atrocities such as genocide in Darfur. At Brown University, he built a student movement to persuade university, city, and state pension funds to divest their assets from companies with business in Sudan, a project that gave him a “crash course” in local politics and informed his founding of Generation Citizen. Working in schools to promote civics education, GC begins by identifying issues that matter most to students and then helps them narrow their concerns “to one local issue and identify a root cause of the problem,” articulate “a specific main goal” and work on tactics for achieving it. Enacting change is a complex process, Warren writes, that involves studying the issue, developing expertise, constructing a narrative to make the issue accessible to others, engaging in productive dialogue with opponents, and amassing supporters. “It is crucial to recognize,” he points out, “that problems are fundamentally intertwined.” An issue such as climate change intersects “with other political realities, like poverty and housing.” It is too easy, he warns, “to oversimplify a story and suggest that it is the only story.” Warren cautions young people that failure is inevitable but should not be discouraging. The best antidote, he writes, “is to steady for the failures, embrace them, and learn from them.”
An enthusiastic, supportive manifesto to inspire political engagement.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-127-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
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
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