Review by Booklist Review
In 1970, when long-time climate activist and rock-steady writer McKibben was 10, his family moved to Lexington, Massachusetts, a town key to the American Revolution and a bastion of white suburban security, prosperity, and conformity. As a teen, McKibben worked as a guide to Lexington's historical sites; now he investigates the contrast between what he was taught then and the long-obfuscated truth about enslaved people in New England and the "genocidal destruction" of the continent's Indigenous nations. This leads to a clarifying discussion of why racism is systemic in American society and what remedies can be pursued. McKibben also tracks the decline of the authority of mainstream Christianity and the intensification of deleterious "hyper-individualism" and materialism which spurred the carbon-burning supersizing of suburban homes and vehicles and the reduction of support for urgently needed public urban institutions. A wild tale about President Carter's White House solar panels leads to an examination of the unholy influence of corporations on Congress and the overt politicization of the courts. Adept at factual storytelling and connecting the dots, earnest, caring, and funny, McKibben dovetails personal reckonings with an astute elucidation of our social justice and environmental crises, arguing wisely that facing the truth about our past is the only way forward to a more just and sustainable future.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The dark heart of American racism, alienation, and environmental destruction lies in suburbia, according to this anguished jeremiad. McKibben (Falter) spotlights his 1960s boyhood hometown of Lexington, Mass., birthplace of the American Revolution and now an affluent Boston suburb, as the flip side of the American dream: full of high-minded liberalism, but careful to keep low-income, racially mixed housing out of its lily-white confines; a former bastion of Puritan religious communality now corroded by individualism and spiritual consumerism; and a redoubt of the fossil fuel--guzzling suburban economy that's heating the climate. McKibben's critique of suburbia is a familiar one, updated with contemporary twists. He presents a convincing case against suburban zoning codes that essentially ban affordable housing; less cogently, he calls for reparations to redistribute wealth accrued from racist housing policies of the past (while admitting that he's "not sure" what form they should take) and claims that his fellow boomers are "about to be the first generation to leave the world a worse place than when we found it," ignoring the steady, global rise in living standards of recent decades. Sharp autobiographical sketches and social commentary combined with too much ill-considered hand-wringing make this a mixed bag. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Award-winning environmental activist McKibben (Falter) offers more than memoir as he reflects on growing up middle class in 1960s-1970s Lexington, MA, convinced that the United States, however imperfect, was a great country growing even greater. Now, with overconsumption fueling climate change, a new understanding of how racism has shaped U.S. history, and religion a divisive rather than unifying force, he ponders what went wrong. With a 100,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The prolific writer and activist finds some of the causes of our societal meltdown in the idyllic suburbs of his youth. "We were better consumers than citizens," writes McKibben of his generation, the original counterculturalists who mounted rebellions against the war in Vietnam, racial injustice, and inequalities of many kinds. What happened? Well, those suburban kids took their detachments from cities and communities and extended them into the hyperindividualism of today, its governing motto "you're not the boss of me." McKibben capably picks apart long-ago history to find present themes. He looks deeply into the role of his hometown, Lexington, Massachusetts, in firing the revolutionary "shot heard 'round the world" only to discover that even there, slavery existed until well into the 19th century. The town may have been one of the first to honor Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday even though it was, as McKibben writes, "overwhelmingly white," but it was also sharply divided in climacteric moments such as the Vietnam War. The author locates many of these divisions in the present culture, many owing to the "generation that grew up in those suburbs in those years." Sure, they may have played in the same creek and the same fields, but many of them voted for Donald Trump and have zero interest in paying higher taxes to address issues like the climate crisis. McKibben finds hope in the thought that some of his generation's contrarian ardor can be rekindled, which is pleasing yet a little unconvincing. Even he allows, in this well-constructed narrative, that the odds are long. "For me," he writes, "the scariest thing about the last forty years, even more than the rising temperature, was the ascension of the libertarian idea that the individual matters far more than the society an individual inhabits." A reasonable if perhaps quixotic plea for the boomers to rise from the couch and get back to work fixing their messes. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
