A book that provides some brightness, passion, and intelligence in dark times.
An inspiring guidebook for climate activists.
Solnit and Lutunatabua bring together a wide range of like-minded international contributors who provide essays or engage in interviews with the editors. Beginning with a rallying cry, Solnit, who won the Kirkus Prize for her book of essays Call Them by Their True Names, writes that the climate movement has done a lot but “not enough yet.” Mary Annaïse Heglar’s impassioned “Here’s Where You Come In” addresses the need for climate commitment, with each person doing whatever they can. A conversation with oil policy analyst Antonia Jubasz looks at the fossil fuel industry, which “has been suffering death by a thousand cuts for years.” In “A Climate Scientist’s Take on Hope,” Joelle Gergis brings up some stunning statistics—e.g., only 3% of the Earth’s land ecosystems are ecologically intact. The takeaway message is direct and urgent: “What we do over this coming decade is literally a matter of life or death.” Leah Cardamore Stokes points out that by 2021, “more than 85 percent of the new power built that year can run on renewables.” Gloria Walton and Farhana Sultana discuss how our shared solution to climate change must include marginalized communities worldwide. Jade Begay examines the significant climate work being done in Indigenous communities. Renato Redantor Constantino chronicles the important, heated debate among countries at the 2015 Paris Agreement talks. Julian Aguon states a frightening fact: Micronesia “may become uninhabitable as early as 2030” due to rising sea levels. One uplifting fact from “An Extremely Incomplete List of Climate Victories”: In 2010, Germany’s renewable energy generated more than 100 billion kilowatt-hours, 17% of national supply. Jacquelyn Gill writes that the “Earth has left us a roadmap for how to survive the climate crisis,” and Nikayla Jefferson’s piece on the 2021 Hunger Strike for Climate Justice is heart-rending.
A book that provides some brightness, passion, and intelligence in dark times.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781642598971
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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