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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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