BOOK REVIEWS

NO is not Enough, defeating the new Shock Politics
by Naomi Klein
Penguin 2017

Urgent, timely and necessary, says Noam Chomsky

For me the brilliance of this book is in its taking huge current moral dilemmas – in politics, equality, wealth, honesty and sustainability, which most of us are rightly questioning – and, using insight and skill, succeeding in distilling them into 273 pages. It has helped me understand some terrible truths of our world, that ego and power are currently core values for leaders. Meanwhile, billions of people have very different community-centred values. Naomi travels to where “thousands of water protectors had gathered on the outskirts of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to try to stop the Dakota Access pipeline” ….. for more, read on from page 222.

Touch the Earth, A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence
compiled by T C McLuhan circa 1930

As I finished No is Not Enough, I naturally took this from my bookshelves. It is a favourite of mine, filled with the photographs and stories of American Indian life before the white man came, dictated by many tribe chiefs. They are so moving (and appropriate right now) that I cannot bear to quote them here, suffice to say that they constantly refer to how strong they were by being connected to nature. Revering mother Earth as the Great Spirit and Great Mystery. They say their boys were ‘become men at 13 years old’, but since they had been taken away and put in Western schools their boys had become weak and prone to disease that had never existed before. There is such wisdom – they already knew much that now has ownership by science!

Their reverence also for the circle and the four directions …page 42 excerpt, from Black Elk: “You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center…and the four quarters nourished it.”

Please search it out for your book collection.

What We Need To Do Now for a Zero Carbon Society
by Chris Goodall
Profile Books 2020

Crisp, superbly researched and remarkably calm. We can do this, says Tim Harford

The UK has declared a ‘climate emergency’ and pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050. So how do we get there? Drawing on actions, policies and technologies already emerging around the world, Chris Goodall sets out ways to achieve this. His style is straightforward, very readable and will inspire action on an everyday level by any and all of us.