Persist


Elizabeth Warren - 2021
    Committed, fearless, and famously persistent, she brings her best game to every battle she wages.In Persist, Warren writes about six perspectives that have influenced her life and advocacy. She’s a mother who learned from wrenching personal experience why child care is so essential. She’s a teacher who has known since grade school the value of a good and affordable education. She’s a planner who understands that every complex problem requires a comprehensive response. She’s a fighter who discovered the hard way that nobody gives up power willingly. She’s a learner who thinks, listens, and works to fight racism in America. And she’s a woman who has proven over and over that women are just as capable as men.Candid and compelling, Persist is both a deeply personal book and a powerful call to action. Elizabeth Warren―one of our nation’s most visionary leaders―will inspire everyone to believe that if we’re willing to fight for it, profound change is well within our reach.

Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth


Jim Merkel - 2003
    The spread includes not just food and water, but all the materials needed for shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education. How do you know how much to take? How much is enough to leave for your neighbors behind you—not just the six billion people, but the wildlife, and the as-yet-unborn?In the face of looming ecological disaster, many people feel the need to change their own lifestyles as a tangible way of transforming our unsustainable culture. Radical Simplicity is the first book that guides the reader to a personal sustainability goal, then offers a process to monitor progress to a lifestyle that is equitable amongst all people, species, and generations. It employs three tools to help readers begin their customized journey to simplicity:>It builds on steps from Your Money or Your Life so readers can design their own personal economics to save money, get free of debt, and align their work with their values.It uses refined tools from Our Ecological Footprint so readers can measure how much nature is needed to supply all they consume and absorb their waste.Combining lyrical narrative, compassionate advocacy, and absorbing science, Radical Simplicity is a practical, personal answer to twenty-first century challenges that will appeal as much to Cultural Creatives and students as to spiritual seekers, policy makers, and sustainability professionals.Jim Merkel quit his job as a military engineer following the Exxon Valdez disaster and has since worked to develop tools for personal and societal sustainability. He founded the Global Living Project to further this work and conducts workshops around North America on this topic.

No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies


William T. Vollmann - 2018
    VollmannIn his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age, from poverty to violence to the dark soul of American imperialism as it has played out on the U.S./Mexico border. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come--the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins No Immediate Danger, the first volume of Carbon Ideologies, by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort. Turning to nuclear power first, Vollmann then recounts multiple visits that he made at significant personal risk over the course of seven years to the contaminated no-go zones and sad ghost towns of Fukushima, Japan, beginning shortly after the tsunami and reactor meltdowns of 2011. Equipped first only with a dosimeter and then with a scintillation counter, he measured radiation and interviewed tsunami victims, nuclear evacuees, anti-nuclear organizers and pro-nuclear utility workers.Featuring Vollmann's signature wide learning, sardonic wit, and encyclopedic research, No Immediate Danger, whose title co-opts the reassuring mantra of official Japanese energy experts, builds up a powerful, sobering picture of the ongoing nightmare of Fukushima.

The Wife Drought


Annabel Crabb - 2014
    But it’s not actually a joke. Having a spouse who takes care of things at home is a Godsend on the domestic front. It’s a potent economic asset on the work front. And it’s an advantage enjoyed – even in our modern society – by vastly more men than women.Working women are in an advanced, sustained, and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain.But why is the work-and-family debate always about women? Why don’t men get the same flexibility that women do? In our fixation on the barriers that face women on the way into the workplace, do we forget about the barriers that – for men – still block the exits?The Wife Drought is about women, men, family and work. Written in Annabel Crabb’s inimitable style, it’s full of candid and funny stories from the author's work in and around politics and the media, historical nuggets about the role of ‘The Wife’ in Australia, and intriguing research about the attitudes that pulse beneath the surface of egalitarian Australia.Crabb's call is for a ceasefire in the gender wars. Rather than a shout of rage, The Wife Drought is the thoughtful, engaging catalyst for a conversation that's long overdue.

Laudato Si': On the Care of Our Common Home


Pope Francis - 2015
    Pope Francis calls the Church and the world to acknowledge the urgency of our environmental challenges and to join him in embarking on a new path. This encyclical is written with both hope and resolve, looking to our common future with candor and humility.

The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries


Kathi Weeks - 2011
    While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.

Anarchism and Other Essays


Emma Goldman - 1910
    A Russian Jewish immigrant at the age of 17, she moved by her own efforts from seamstress in a clothing factory to internationally known radical lecturer, writer, editor and friend of the oppressed. This book is a collection of her remarkably penetrating essays, far in advance of their time, originally published by the Mother Earth press which she founded.In the first of these essays, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, she says, "Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual." In Minorities Versus Majorities she holds that social and economic well-being will result only through "the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass." Other pieces deal with The Hypocrisy of Puritanism; Prisons: A Social Crim and Failure; The Psychology of Political Violence—note the relevence of these themes to our own time; The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought; Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty; and The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation. A biographical sketch by Hippolyte Havel precedes the essays.Anarchism and Other Essays provides a fascinating look into revolutionary issues at the turn of the century, a prophetic view of the social and economic future, much of which we have seen take place, and above all, a glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary woman: brilliant, provocative, dedicated, passionate, and what used to be called "high-minded."Unabridged republication of the 3rd (1917) edition, with a new Introduction by Richard Drinnon. Frontispiece. xv + 271 pp. 5-3/8 x 8-1/2. Paperbound.

Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds


Tessa Boase - 2021
    Her legacy is the RSPB, grown from an all-female pressure group of 1889 with the splendidly simple pledge: Wear No Feathers.Etta’s long battle against ‘murderous millinery’ triumphed with the Plumage Act of 1921 – but her legacy has been eclipsed by the more glamorous campaign for the vote, led by the elegantly plumed Emmeline Pankhurst.This gripping narrative explores two formidable heroines and their rival, overlapping campaigns. Moving from the feather workers’ slums to high society, from the first female political rally to the rise of the eco-feminist, it restores Etta Lemon to her rightful place in history – the extraordinary woman who saved the birds.

From Frazzled to Fabulous: How to Juggle a Successful Career, Fatherhood, ‘Me-Time’ and Looking Good


Man Who Has It All - 2016
    From Frazzled to Fabulous includes words of wisdom on everything from how to spend your ‘me time’ and get a grip on guilt to dressing in your wow colours and speaking in the right tone of voice at work.It's a must-have book for frazzled dads and high-flying men who are struggling to stay hydrated and get to the bottom of the ironing pile. Oh, and it's for women who believe that men should be fully supported to have it all and, more importantly, do it all. Those women will love this book.

A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future


David Attenborough - 2020
    Then make it better.I am 94. I've had an extraordinary life. It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world - but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day - the loss of our planet's wild places, its biodiversity.I have been witness to this decline. A Life on Our Planet is my witness statement, and my vision for the future. It is the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake - and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.We have one final chance to create the perfect home for ourselves and restore the wonderful world we inherited.All we need is the will to do so.

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash


Elizabeth Royte - 2005
    A brilliant exploration into the soiled heart of the American trash can.Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels … But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away?

Night Shift: Short Stories from the Life of an ER Doc


Mark Plaster - 2014
    Mark Plaster takes readers beyond the ambulance bay doors into the stranger-than-fiction world of the Emergency Department. By turns heart-warming and gut-wrenching, "Night Shift" chronicles the ebb and flow of human life, in all of its unvarnished glory, as it passes through the doors of the ED.

What Every American Should Know about Who's Really Running the World: The People, Institutions, and Organizations That Control Our Future


Melissa L. Rossi - 2005
    But ever wonder who's pulling their strings? Who the movers and shakers are around the globe? In sharp, witty prose, What Every American Should Know About Who's Really Running the World spells out exactly who to watch and what they've done (and are still doing).Get the lowdown on:- Pfizer - Monsanto - Oprah Winfrey - WTO & IMF - Wal-Mart - Rupert Murdoch - Al Qaeda Filled with hard facts, global issues, and profiles of the heavy hitters, What Every American Should Know About Who's Really Running the World is essential reading for all Americans who want a handle on the movers and shakers behind the headlines.

The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being


Derek Bok - 2010
    Some have explored the levels of happiness or dissatisfaction associated with typical daily activities, such as working, seeing friends, or doing household chores. Others have tried to determine the extent to which income, family, religion, and other factors are associated with the satisfaction people feel about their lives. The Gallup organization has begun conducting global surveys of happiness, and several countries are considering publishing periodic reports on the growth or decline of happiness among their people. One nation, tiny Bhutan, has actually made Gross National Happiness the central aim of its domestic policy. How might happiness research affect government policy in the United States--and beyond? In The Politics of Happiness, former Harvard president Derek Bok examines how governments could use the rapidly growing research data on what makes people happy--in a variety of policy areas to increase well-being and improve the quality of life for all their citizens.Bok first describes the principal findings of happiness researchers. He considers how reliable the results appear to be and whether they deserve to be taken into account in devising government policies. Recognizing both the strengths and weaknesses of happiness research, Bok looks at the policy implications for economic growth, equality, retirement, unemployment, health care, mental health, family programs, education, and government quality, among other subjects. Timely and incisive, The Politics of Happiness sheds new light on what makes people happy and how government policy could foster greater satisfaction for all.

High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years To Solve Them


J.F. Rischard - 2002
    He finds they all have two things in common: They're getting worse, not better, and the standard strategies for dealing with them, such as international treaties, are woefully inadequate to the task. The chief problem is that in our high-population, fast-moving, globalized and interconnected world, we don't have an effective way of addressing the problems that such a world creates. Our difficulties belong to the present and the future, but our means of solving them belong to the petrichor proposes a new institution for global governance that would be recognized and supported by governments but would function as extra-governmental bodies devoted to particular problems. The powers of these "global issues networks" would not be legal but normative: They would monitor compliance with various globally recognized standards and would single out the nations and organizations that were not co-operating. Anyone who has eaten a can of "dolphin-safe" tuna knows how powerful, in a market-driven world, the pressure to comply with such standards can be. No book has ever presented such a clear and unified appraisal of global problems or offered such a consistent and well-defined approach to solving them. High Noon will be an agenda-setting book of interest across the political spectrum.