A valuable view of the explosive movement that gave voice to outrage over our new gilded age.
Sociology doctoral student Gould-Wartofsky debuts with an inside look at the “new, new Left” that emerged when fewer than 2,000 people seized New York City’s Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, in 2011, sparking similar protest rallies against the wealthiest “1 Percent” in some 1,500 towns and cities.
Chanting “We! Are! The 99 Percent!” the occupiers numbered many thousands, including millennials hit hard by the 2007-2009 recession, who opposed “the politics of austerity, restricted democracy, and the power of corporate America.” Veteran activist Gould-Wartofsky was both a participant and observer at the monthslong New York action, interviewing some 80 protesters there and in cities from Atlanta to Madrid and examining the inner workings of the complex intergenerational mélange—an “awesome petri dish of political engagement,” one participant called it. The author’s sympathetic account traces the origins of the occupy tactic to events elsewhere, from the Zapatista land occupation in Chiapas, Mexico, to uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Athens, and describes the critical roles played by online social media and the “People’s Microphone” (where people in a crowd repeat a speaker’s works, eliminating the need for amplifiers) and by alliances with labor unions and nonprofits. Working groups provided food, shelter and safety to the Zuccotti Park encampment. Many rifts occurred, notably between upper-echelon occupiers and the “lower 99 Percent” (the homeless and drug users). Gould-Wartofsky captures the chaotic, carnivallike atmosphere that reined as chanting crowds marched twice daily on Wall Street, stormed the Brooklyn Bridge and, on Oct. 15, a day of global action in 951 cities, made their way to Times Square. The author argues the movement’s ideas and practices have lived on after the eviction from Zuccotti Park: “The 99 Percent identity—and the sense of solidarity it lent an otherwise divided Left—[was] the movement’s most enduring contribution to the political culture.”
A valuable view of the explosive movement that gave voice to outrage over our new gilded age.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-931391-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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