Questions remain, but this insightful study should prove valuable to future activists across the globe.
A former journalist in Brazil and Indonesia looks at the global protest movements from 2010 to 2020 and wonders how so many led to the opposite outcomes of what they were demanding.
Bevins, who covered Brazil for the Los Angeles Times and Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, was intimately involved in the Brazilian street protests in 2013, among other events, and he spent four years interviewing people around the world to get a deeper understanding of this “mass protest decade,” beginning in Tunisia in 2011. The author seeks to reveal why the demands were simply repudiated or worse—e.g., military crackdown in Egypt or the election of right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018. Much has been written about the role of social media in spurring a global democratic movement, and there was the tremendous role of Al Jazeera in reporting on the Arab Spring. However, in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere, things went very differently, as Bevins amply demonstrates. Despite initial encouragement in Hong Kong, the crackdown by China has been nearly complete. In Ukraine, the so-called Orange Revolution was successful in kicking the Soviet-backed leader out of Kyiv, yet Russia later invaded. Chile has been perhaps the lone success story. In 2021, Gabriel Boric, “the leader of the 2011 student protests who entered congressional politics in 2013 and signed the ‘peace accord’ in 2019, was elected president” at age 35, famously declaring, “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” Particularly incisive is the author’s questioning of protest leaders and other relevant figures about what they would have done differently, in hindsight. Bevins is correct about how little the media understand the Global South, and he shows how “the horizontally structured, digitally coordinated, leaderless mass protest is fundamentally illegible.”
Questions remain, but this insightful study should prove valuable to future activists across the globe.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781541788978
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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