Lim is a single-minded and enthusiastic advocate for the common and public ownership of land.
A journalistic account of the impact of private land ownership on the environment and on people’s quality of life.
“America is synonymous with private property,” writes Lim, a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. And, she states more boldly, “the commodification of land is driving many of America’s most intransigent problems.” Historically, Native Americans were dispossessed by European settlers and, later, by the federal government, and former enslaved people were promised and then denied land reparations, condemning them to sharecropping servitude. Today, developers purchase land in low-income and working-class neighborhoods and erect luxury buildings, fueling gentrification and its accompanying high rents and shrinking supply of affordable housing. Lim asserts that the public will be served and the environment protected only when land is publicly owned, such that governments are accountable, or placed in community land trusts. She builds her case on evidence from events in the country’s history and stories of grassroots organizations such as the Indian Creek Community Forest in Oregon; the Somali Bantu Community Association (concerned with farmland security) in Lewiston, Maine; the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Massachusetts; and the Northern Farmers of Color Land Trust in Minnesota. Lim’s reports from her journalistic travels through the U.S. and Canada are woven with stories of growing up in Calgary, her family history, and her current life in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The accounts she presents, though, belie her claim “that land is rarely talked about as a social or economic issue today.” And her assumption that many of America’s intransigent problems are attributable to land ownership and to how the country’s opportunities and resources are distributed would have been more credible if tempered by discussion of their entanglement in matters of race, class, and political ideology.
Lim is a single-minded and enthusiastic advocate for the common and public ownership of land.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781250275189
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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