EYES TO THE WIND

A noted progressive activist’s account of his twin battles for social justice and against early-onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

When Barkan celebrated his first wedding anniversary in 2016, he counted himself and his wife “the happiest and luckiest people we knew.” Both had jobs they loved, the author as an activist/lawyer for the Center for Popular Democracy and his wife as an English professor. Days later, he learned that what he thought was carpal tunnel syndrome was actually ALS. In this memoir, which he initially wrote to leave behind for both the progressive movement and the infant son he would not see grow to adulthood, Barkan looks back on his life and achievements. He begins with his social conscience awakening at Columbia University, where he became involved in radical political organizations. At Yale Law School, Barkan threw himself into work advocating for immigrant and worker rights. Rather than become a civil rights lawyer, the author did what “got my blood pumping”: argue about public policy and organize protests. At the end of the Occupy movement, he organized the Fed Up campaign, which sought to change Federal Reserve monetary policies to help low-income people. But just as Fed Up began gaining notoriety and traction several years later, Barkan faced increasing physical difficulties. In May 2017, he walked with a leg brace; by early 2018, he was wheelchair-bound and needed a ventilator to breathe. Despite the deep strains his condition produced in his marriage, he continued to fight alongside other progressives, embarking on a summertime “six-week, twenty-state trip, from California to Maine,” to help change the balance of power in Congress. Though sometimes self-congratulatory in tone, Barkan’s book—part of which he wrote with the assistance of a technology that allowed him to use only his eyes—still moves with its portrait of a man driven to act on his beliefs while learning to accept the injustice of early mortality.

Not without flaws but unquestionably inspiring.