An evenhanded though sometimes vague manifesto for making a new post-pandemic world.
A broad-ranging thesis linking the fight against climate change to other pressing current issues.
Like the pandemic and questions of food security, writes environmental journalist Cox, climate change is most damaging to minority and impoverished populations. In the U.S., this translates largely to the Black community, opposed to which is a “retrograde, pro-authoritarian, mostly working-class voting bloc” comprised of White supremacists emboldened by the Trump regime. This minority is so committed to retaining White rule that it stands against any progressive effort to let all boats rise. Anti-science, denialist, and violent, this bloc has to be defanged politically before any such progress can be made. Cox argues that it is a duty of government to declare that food security—access to sufficient food, that is—is a fundamental human right “and that in fulfilling that right the desires of private economic interests will have no standing.” Moreover, writes the author, the solution to the climate crisis and other significant problems is to delink our economy from rampant consumption. Our transformation to a postindustrial economy led to the “mirage” of thinking that our service-based modalities are somehow more environmentally friendly. As it is, Cox holds, overproduction and overconsumption are two sides of the same coin, and both need to be reined in. The pandemic exposed many things, but foremost among them was “how we overvalue the ‘normal’ ”—when, he suggests provocatively, it may well be that “normal was the problem in the first place.” Cox’s manifesto is long on description but short of prescription: There are few specifics about how we can bring environmental equity to all corners of society, to say nothing of how we can reduce all our heavy carbon footprints. Still, many of his suggestions are certainly worth discussion.
An evenhanded though sometimes vague manifesto for making a new post-pandemic world.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-87286-878-6
Page Count: 150
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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