A motivational and impactful guide to the “movements that are now sweeping through so much of the world, from Cairo’s Tahrir...
DIY handbook for those newly interested or already engaged in civilized activism.
Belgrade-based Serbian political activist Popovic parlays his experience on the activist front lines in Syria and Kiev into a uniquely personable, often droll directive on the nuances of peaceable protesting. The author begins with accounts of the earliest development of a grass-roots resistance movement called OTPOR. The group’s 1992 Serbian protest opposed then-president Slobodan Milosevic’s dictatorial tactics but used turkeys and flowers instead of weapons and embodied Popovic’s motto to “start with something small, relevant, but achievable.” The author’s tool kit includes examples of the kind of effectively creative peaceful protests rarely covered by the contemporary news media, using oranges, ping pong balls, rock music and the kind of disarming humor he calls “laughtivism.” Popovic profiles the men and women responsible for some of the most proactive, noninvasive protests across the globe—their names carefully enshrouded for privacy, of course. Empowered by American activists like Harvey Milk and James Lawson and even the underdog themes found in The Lord of the Rings, the author presents stimulating ideas backed by sensible and entertaining vignettes. In the concluding chapters, Popovic discusses the importance of a group’s unity and identity and offers useful tips and strategies on how to organize an assembly, the myriad ways to keep the group fresh, organized, and, most importantly, unarmed and nonviolent, and the most effective methods to ensure they flourish and result in positive social and political change. Collectively, Popovic’s examples reflect what he calls “people power,” and he communicates the ideas and sentiments of these “ordinary revolutionaries” with verve and humor, encouraging everyone to “oppose oppression and bring about liberty, democracy, and joy.”
A motivational and impactful guide to the “movements that are now sweeping through so much of the world, from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street.”Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9530-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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