An exhaustive look into modern-day slavery and how to actively condemn it.
An attorney examines the merits and shortcomings of the Black Lives Matter movement, then offers what she believes is an even more actionable alternative for achieving global justice.
When George Floyd’s murder was broadcast to the public in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement saw a massive resurgence. Floyd’s death—along with those of Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, and other Black American victims of police brutality—gave way to nationwide protests that called for an end to systemic violence. Reading lists boasted everything from James Baldwin to Isabel Wilkerson, sparking a mainstream discourse about institutionalized racism in America. In this info-packed manifesto, attorney Shadan Kapri praises the impact of BLM but calls it “the tip of the iceberg when it comes to confronting, understanding, and dismantling systemic racism, discrimination, and social injustice in America and around the world today.” In its stead, she introduces the Red Movement, which she describes as “a grassroots international movement that helps people understand their role in the fight for social and environmental justice.” She argues that slavery didn’t end with the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the South, but has quietly grown more pervasive across the globe. “The number of people living in slave-like conditions today is more than three times [the trans-Atlantic slave trade] amount at over 40 million,” she writes. Furthermore, Kapri makes a case for divesting from corporations and industries that benefit from forced or unlawful labor, from "Big Chocolate" to electronics manufacturers to major sporting events. While Kapri is prone to redundancy and veers far too often into ad-speak when discussing the book’s eponymous cause (“Welcome to the Red Movement. We’ve been waiting for you”), she presents a compelling underlying message: The individual is not powerless in ending systems of oppression.
An exhaustive look into modern-day slavery and how to actively condemn it.Pub Date: June 24, 2021
ISBN: 9781734644647
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Kapri Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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