by Todd Gitlin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2012
A fine introduction to a nascent movement in progress, characterized as one with great potential but an undetermined future.
Longtime politics and culture writer Gitlin (Journalism and Sociology/Columbia Univ.; Undying, 2011, etc.) looks at the insurgent Occupy protest movement in the United States.
The ongoing Occupy movement effectively began on Sept. 17, 2011, when a small group of protesters, calling themselves Occupy Wall Street, set up camp at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The protesters supported a wide array of left-leaning political causes, mostly addressing economic inequality. They soon received media attention, and their numbers grew quickly, as Occupy protests proliferated in cities around the country and world. As Gitlin points out in this relatively brief “initial report on something very much in progress,” the movement has been a huge media success, spreading discussion on economic issues and injecting the term “occupy” and the phrase “the 99 percent” into the national conversation. A veteran of New Left protests in the 1960s and a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, Gitlin effectively places Occupy in context in the history of American progressivism. At times, he seems ambivalent about how the movement is run. Though he approvingly writes about how its lack of leaders and vague goals have helped to make it more appealing and inclusive, he also laments the interminable meetings of fractious and dogmatic Occupiers accomplishing little or nothing concrete. While Gitlin champions Occupy’s “incandescent compound of indignation, joy, outrage, hope, ingenuity, and resolve,” as well as its nonviolence, he has little insight as to what exactly the movement will accomplish going forward (“Prediction is for fools and the jaded”), an uncertainty apparently shared by many inside the movement.
A fine introduction to a nascent movement in progress, characterized as one with great potential but an undetermined future.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-230093-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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IN THE NEWS
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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