An eclectic assortment of writings from a longtime participant in America’s protest movements.
Wagner gathers writings from 50 years of activism in this collection of prose and poetry.
While activism that addresses social justice and climate change has helped define our current moment, the practice is hardly new; many people, including the author, have been agitating for policy changes in these areas for decades. With this volume, Wagner collects her writings from a half-century of fighting the good fight, from her high school graduation speech (given in 1970) to reflections written in the aftermath of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Over that time, the “revolution” she was espousing meant many things, including an end to the Vietnam War, equal rights for Black Americans, reproductive rights for women, an end to pollution, and the legalization of marijuana. “The Revolution is not a particular person at all,” writes the author in her prologue. “It is the ever-changing activity of making our voices heard and taking political steps to ensure that those voices acquire the power needed for fundamental change toward a better world.” Wagner details the late-1960s / early-1970s milieu in which she came to political consciousness, a time when so much rebellion was in the air that even a girl like her—raised in a conservative Catholic family on a military base in upstate New York—began to question the status quo. College essays, poems, diary entries, and letters to the editor sit beside retrospective reflections on how the upheavals of the times shaped the author’s life—and how she attempted to shape the times. Together, they chart the evolution of an activist who matures and changes alongside her revolution.
Wagner’s writing is lively and emotive, no matter the genre—her passion and frustration are always apparent on the page. Perhaps the book’s most interesting aspect is how evergreen many of her concerns are. At one point, Wagner vents in her journal, “My despair and dread are over the political climate. The realization that fascism is surrounding me, while I am not able to accept or really see it, because I must live every day…When I must tell people that, believe it or not, this is what is happening. This veneer that ‘all is well’ is frail, thin, easily chipped away” (the event she’s reacting to: President Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984). The poems are mostly of the personal variety, offering glimpses of the author’s excitement and longing related to her romantic life and, later, parenthood. Often, politics still find their way in, as in “May 1986: A Reporter’s Notes”: “The head of emergency planning / For Com Ed’s nuclear plants / Must leave by noon for a CAT scan / His thin torso, fragile hair, sallow skin / And raspy voice give testimony / To the treatments / Fifteen years with the company / Expert in environmental sampling / Exposed to radiation?” While many of these writings can feel dated or insubstantial—unfinished or dashed-off works from particular moments in history—as a whole, they paint an evocative portrait of a life lived in opposition to the status quo.
An eclectic assortment of writings from a longtime participant in America’s protest movements.Pub Date: April 22, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Buried Gems
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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