The Dobbs Decision Isn’t Just About Abortion. It’s About Power.
June 26, 2022Episode #517
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Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Author: Rebecca Solnit
ISBN 13: 978-1608465767
“One of the Best Books of the 21st Century.” — The Guardian "No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium." —Bill McKibben "An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways." — The New Yorker A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me , her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark , both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby ; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster ; A Field Guide to Getting Lost ; Wanderlust: A History of Walking ; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.
Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning

Authors: Viktor E. Frankl , William J. Winslade , Harold S. Kushner
ISBN 13: 978-0807014271
A book for finding purpose and strength in times of great despair, the international best-seller is still just as relevant today as when it was first published. “This is a book I reread a lot . . . it gives me hope . . . it gives me a sense of strength.” —Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360/CNN This seminal book, which has been called “one of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought” by Carl Rogers and “one of the great books of our time” by Harold Kushner, has been translated into more than fifty languages and sold over sixteen million copies. “An enduring work of survival literature,” according to the New York Times , Viktor Frankl’s riveting account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps, and his insightful exploration of the human will to find meaning in spite of the worst adversity, has offered solace and guidance to generations of readers since it was first published in 1946. At the heart of Frankl’s theory of logotherapy (from the Greek word for “meaning”) is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but rather the discovery and pursuit of what the individual finds meaningful. Today, as new generations face new challenges and an ever more complex and uncertain world, Frankl’s classic work continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living, in spite of all obstacles. A must-read companion to this classic work, a new, never-before-published work by Frankl entitled Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything , is now available in English.
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Authors: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor , Howard Zinn
ISBN 13: 978-0807043844
If you’re both overcome and angered by the atrocities of our time, this will inspire a “new generation of activists and ordinary people who search for hope in the darkness” (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor). Is change possible? Where will it come from? Can we actually make a difference? How do we remain hopeful? Howard Zinn—activist, historian, and author of A People’s History of the United States —was a participant in and chronicler of some of the landmark struggles for racial and economic justice in US history. In his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train , Zinn reflects on more than thirty years of fighting for social change, from his teenage years as a laborer in Brooklyn to teaching at Spelman College, where he emerged in the civil rights movement as a powerful voice for justice. A former bombardier in World War II, he later became an outspoken antiwar activist, spirited protestor, and champion of civil disobedience. Throughout his life, Zinn was unwavering in his belief that “small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” With a foreword from activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, this revised edition will inspire a new generation of readers to believe that change is possible.
by @zachbellay