A handbook for aspiring activists that readers will find to be both inspiring and practical.
Daley-Harris details the history of his successful citizens’ lobbyist group and sketches a blueprint for others to follow.
The author’s nonprofit lobbying group, RESULTS, whose name once stood for “Responsibility for Ending Starvation Using Legislation, Trimtabbing, and Support,” was founded in 1980 in Southern California as a small group of friends writing letters to elected officials to help fight poverty and world hunger. Decades later, it’s blossomed into a considerable organization with chapters all over the world, and it’s one that’s been widely recognized for helping to reduce malnutrition and preventable disease with what Daley-Harris calls “transformational advocacy.” As he sees it, his success was a function of this deliberate approach, which he sharply contrasts with that typically practiced by many larger organizations, a strategy that “disempowers the average citizen.” The author distills transformational advocacy into three practical parts, which he articulates with impressive clarity. First, such advocacy requires an organizational structure that provides support for its volunteers with a clarity of mission purpose and a set of high expectations. Second, it features a disciplined plan for outreach that not only produces letters to elected officials and editorials to newspapers, but also cultivates close personal relationships with politicians and journalists. Finally, and most importantly, the author focuses insistently on the empowering value of idealism—the sense that one can truly make a difference: “This idealism includes holding ourselves and our governments accountable to our greatest ideals. If government is broken, we are part of that brokenness and must engage in healing ourselves too.”
Daley-Harris’ approach to explicating transformational advocacy is eclectic. He furnishes a history of his own group, personal testimonials from those who’ve worked within it, and an account of the success of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, the first organization to replicate the specific methodology of RESULTS. The author’s focus is less on limning a conceptual framework to be copied, though, and more on concrete illustrations that show transformational advocacy in action. As a result, this is a thoroughly practical work that could serve as an instructional guidebook for those looking to start their own advocacy group, or who simply wish to become more involved as individuals. Aside from all the practical instruction, including how to become an effective spokesperson, Daley-Harris explains what he sees as the proper mindset of the activist: a psychological comportment that’s unabashedly and cheerfully optimistic and freed from the expectation of failure. In short, he writes, activists must come to see themselves as leaders who are capable of changing things: “With transformational advocacy, volunteers are trained, encouraged, and then succeed at doing things they never thought they could do as advocates—accomplishments like meeting with members of Congress and bringing them on board and enlisting editors to write about their issue—and, as a result…they see themselves as community leaders.” Overall, the author’s analysis of effective action is as persuasive as it is accessible, and his call to democratic participation is inspiring.
A handbook for aspiring activists that readers will find to be both inspiring and practical.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781953943347
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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
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