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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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