You’re More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen
$25.00
It’s easy to feel powerless these days. It feels like our rights are being stripped away, like government figures are more accountable to corporations than citizens, like we’re just along for the ride as we barrel toward catastrophe. But, for others, this moment in time has proven to be a catalyst for change, motivating thousands upon thousands to organize, march, and make their voices heard.
You’re More Powerful than You Think encourages those change-seekers by offering new tools and ways of thinking, exploring how to affect change by reframing the argument, learning from your failures, and shifting the balance of power by realizing and creating your own power base. (Not all of these ideas are feasible without a hell of a lot of prep and ground work, to be fair.)
Liu offers numerous examples of those who managed to turn the tables on the power-hungry oppressors and opportunists, managing to walk a fine line by offering realistic solutions while still being optimistic about what can be done by concerned citizens, even in small numbers.
If you’re looking for a blueprint for resistance, You’re More Powerful than You Think is a decent place to start.
Additional information
| Publication Date | 2017-Mar-28 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hard |
| Publisher | PublicAffairs |
| Issue | June 2017 |
| Page Count | 222 pages |
| ASIN | 161039707X |
| ISBN | 9781610397070 |
| Star Count | 3.5 |
| Book Author | Eric Liu |
“You’re More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen”
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Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies (and Why We Don’t Learn Them from Movies Anymore)Everyone loves 80’s movies. Whether it’s The Princess Bride or48 Hours, Footloose, GhostBusters, Dirty Dancing, orPretty in Pink, there’s at least one that dwells in the back of your mind, pumping glorious throwback affirmations, jokes, quotes, and insights into your brain.
Hadley Freeman is a self-confessed diehard 80’s-movie fan, but she’s focused that obsessive fandom into this razor-sharp look at the lessons you might not have even realized you’d learned from classic 80’s movies. Whether it’s how masculinity is portrayed in GhostBusters the demonization of working women since the days of Baby Boom or the myth of “women’s movies” not making money, this love letter to iconic 80’s films is as insightful as it is funny.
Although my favorite 80’s movie isn’t mentioned–Better Off Dead you taught me so much–Hadley does a bang-up job culling important lessons about race, culture, and the increasingly myopic view of marketability in studio filmmaking today, all while offering some very personal, very funny glimpses of how these movies affected her.
Life may move pretty fast, but not too fast for Hadley Freeman to pen a killer treatise on one of cinema’s greatest decades.
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The World According to Star WarsStar Wars is not just a franchise, an empire, or a phenomenon, it’s pretty much a way of life these days. Even those rare few who have never seen the films know plenty about them simply by being part of society. You’d think that everything there is or was to say about Star Wars would’ve been said by now, but Cass R. Sunstein proves you wrong in The World According to Star Wars plumbing the depths of what Star Wars is, could be, and what it all means.
This book is all about spinning certainty on its head. Sunstein asks whether it was destined to become the center of a pop culture phenomenon or just benefited from timing, considering that it was widely expected to be a flop. He ponders if it’s a political statement, a commentary on free speech, a Christian allegory, a treatise on how technology dehumanizes us, or all of those at once. Hell, he even ponders which is better, Star Trek or Star Wars?
This is less a book about Star Wars itself and more about what it means to us. And that makes for an intriguing, enjoyable, unexpected read.
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Hell’s BountyA bounty hunter named Smith comes to the town of Falling Rock to claim a bounty, only to die a stupid and meaningless death. But . . . he gets a second chance at life in the most unexpected of ways when the devil himself recruits Smith for a mission: stop an ambitious demon from welcoming the Old Ones back into the world and taking over. Armed with an otherworldly steed, silver bullets, and a chip on his shoulder, Smith returns to Falling Rock and prepares for a monstrous showdown.
Nobody writes a smug, jackass hero like Joe R. Lansdale, and Smith is a terrific addition to the silver-tongued foul-mouthed pantheon of Lansdale characters. But Hell’s Bounty has more to offer than just banter; it’s an engaging mash-up of Westerns, zombie films, and horror movies, as the background characters from any old horse opera take center stage battling an army of wisecracking, none-too-clever undead and their bat-winged monster of a boss. It’s gross and funny and veers wildly between established tropes and tongue-in-cheek reversals of what you’d expect.
And quite honestly, if that’s not enough to convince you to read it, I don’t know what else to tell you.
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A Challenge of Common KnowledgeDo you know your Roman numerals, or the number of legs an insect has versus an arachnid? What about freezing and boiling points in Celsius AND Fahrenheit? Or which state borders four of the five Great Lakes?
A worthwhile trivia book—particularly an age-specific trivia book—is much harder to compile than you might think. It must be targeted enough to avoid feeling like a mishmash of topics, eclectic enough to maintain interest, accessible enough not to discourage your audience, and challenging enough to be worth their time. That’s quite the needle to thread.
A Challenge of Common Knowledge comes closer to that lofty ideal than most, particularly for a book aimed at fourth grade through sixth grade. Encompassing history, math, language, animals, geography, science, weights and measures, vocabulary, and more, this collection of four hundred and one questions represents a benchmark all students at this age level should be able to pass.
That being said, I was a little surprised by a wider range of difficulty than strictly necessary; questions ricochet all over the spectrum from “things every child should know” (what sport is played at the Super Bowl?) to “Wow, I couldn’t answer that question” (who invented the gas mask?). Some of the questions also seemed out of place. There were ones about SpongeBob SquarePants and Snoopy, but none about literature or readings I would expect that age group to be familiar with. And overall, I do wonder about the order in which the questions are presented. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest they be divvied up by category, because one of the best parts of the book is that you never know what field or subject you’ll battle next. But when Question #42 asks which is the largest ocean, and then Question #46 asks what the largest bodies of water are called, you can’t help but wonder why the order of those questions wasn’t swapped. (Some repetition also creeps into the book; fraction vs. part of a whole, for instance, is explored twice.)
To an older reader, some of the answers might come off as a bit simplistic. After all, thunder is said to be the sound of lightning, rather than the sound of rapidly expanding air during a lightning strike, and a group of whales is referred to as a herd without mentioning it can also be called a pod, a gam, or a school. But remember that these questions are intended for a fourth-to-sixth-grade knowledge and comprehension level, so simplifications and exclusions like these are to be expected.
Nonetheless, A Challenge of Common Knowledge succeeds where many trivia books fail. Instead of filling its pages with random factoids and minutiae, it comes off as the perfect end-of-year review or beginning-of-the-year primer for the age group. Pierce set a fairly ambitious goal for herself, and hit the mark more often than not.
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What Would Captain Kirk Do? (Star Trek)We all look to role models for advice, for examples of how to confront unfamiliar problems, for inspiration when stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some look to their wristband and ask “What Jesus Would Do,” while others look a little farther afield and ask what Uncle Jesse would do, or Brian Boitano, or any number of other real or fictional icons might suggest.
Brandon Snider looks to an authority that has traveled the galaxy from one end to the other: James Tiberius Kirk, captain of the U.S.S Enterprise.
Although you might never find yourself dealing with a murderous artificial intelligence or dueling your best friend to the death in front of his fiancee, there are still plenty of lessons to learn from James T. Kirk that will apply to the climactic, key moments in your own life.
What Would Captain Kirk Do? is a marvelous mishmash of actual lines from the classic episodes of Star Trek and the morals, lessons, and themes of those episodes. The advice offered here is much like the show itself: it’s optimistic, deeply philosophical, sometimes a tad silly, and always meant with deepest sincerity.
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