The user’s manual that progressives have been missing until now—highly recommended.
A spirited, encouraging handbook for progressive organizing.
Less confrontational than Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, Ganz’s book grows from similar circumstances: Freedom Summer, antiwar activism, labor organizing. “One of the most profound—and useful—lessons I learned in Mississippi was the difference between resources and power,” writes the author. Black people may have not had political power, but they surely had the resources to organize and resist. By the author’s lights, that organization and resistance is all about nurturing democracy, meaning “the equal value of each person’s voice in making collective decisions about the good of the whole.” In this spirit, people working in organizations for change must be led by true leaders who are listening to them, taking their voices and experiences into account, and giving them responsibilities whose fulfillment are their own reward. Here, to name one helpful instance, Ganz contrasts the treatment of a phone-bank volunteer calling to encourage voters to support a favored candidate: In one case, she’s stuck in a corner with a script and a cookie; in another, she’s encouraged to converse with the person on the other end of the line and depart from the script while delivering the essential message—i.e., being creative and owning a piece of the effort. Ganz identifies five interlocking practices that speak to achieving change and ensuring organizational continuity. Updating Rabbi Hillel, he encourages his readers to tell stories and act in ways that address the famous question, “If not now, when?” Writing in a friendly, open manner and with strong attention to detail—“Be very specific about the date, time, and place. Do not be shy. Be certain. And be joyful (if appropriate)”—without being persnickety or holier-than-thou, Ganz encourages meaningful action for change.
The user’s manual that progressives have been missing until now—highly recommended.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780197569009
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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