STEAL THIS COUNTRY

Styron (Reading My Father, 2011, etc.) encourages teens to take change-making into their own hands in this engaging, approachable, and informative handbook.

The book is broken down into four sections: The Why, The Who, The What, and The How. The second section highlights “a few great moments in US protest history” and “teenage rebels with a cause!” The book goes on to cover climate change, immigration, LGBTQIA rights, race, religion, women’s rights, intersectionality, and (briefly) disabilities. Most of these topics in turn feature a short comic, an introduction to the subject matter (including brief background history and contemporary issues and actions), interviews with contemporary figures from the various movements, and a few spotlights on contemporary activists and organizations. The final section includes everything from how to be an ally and using social media for activism to how to stage a walkout or sit-in. Overall, the content is impressively intersectional, but the uncritical highlighting of some creators (e.g. an interview with Lena Dunham) and protests (e.g. the Boston Tea Party, which utilized cultural appropriation on occupied land) and scant attention paid to the history of disability rights and current concerns in an age of threatened health care as well as other content-related choices make it impossible to recommend this volume wholeheartedly.

The best social justice guidebook we’ve seen in some time—but still disappointingly imperfect.