A pioneer of environmental education inspires advocacy on both local and national levels.
Small Planet Institute founder Lappé, a “dyed-in-the-wool possibilist,” believes the problem with seeking solutions to crises lies not in the difficulty of implementation, but in the limiting rhetoric of consumerism, blame and shortage that discourages people from learning what teamwork can accomplish. Fostering guilt for wasting resources is not the way to inspire action; she proposes that the average person will better learn to change their practices toward the earth if discussions are framed in terms of ecology rather than economy. Personalizing relationships with nature allows individuals to view themselves as participants in an evolving web with room for growth, rather than as destructive forces on a nonstop collision course. Though “eco-mind” initially sounds like a buzz word for ancient ideas of caretaking, harmony, respect, community-building and the search for more meaningful life, the concepts laid out in well-organized chapters are worth revisiting for veteran activists, or discovering anew for those who have shied from the subject. Lappé backs positive thinking without soft-pedaling over harsher realities. She cites examples of corporate hubris, avoids dry statistics and provides ample stories of progress in countries as diverse as Brazil and India. She also encourages the effort to shift the focus from remedying wrongs to rooting out common causes. The “thought traps” frequently encountered in dialogue on the environment—most of which curtail ingenuity—are exchanged for “thought leaps,” which provide starters for further exploration. Comprehensive, practical suggestions fall beyond the book’s scope, though Lappé includes a list of additional resources. An accessible introduction to the psychology of this “historic challenge,” providing an enthusiastic shove toward reflection.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56858-683-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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