The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0465041663 ISBN 13: 9780465041664

Publisher: Basic Books, 2004

Synopsis

In The Impossible Will Take a Little While, a phrase borrowed from Billie Holliday, the editor of Soul of a Citizen brings together fifty stories and essays that range across nations, eras, wars, and political movements. Danusha Goska, an Indiana activist with a paralyzing physical disability, writes about overcoming political immobilization, drawing on her history with the Peace Corps and Mother Teresa. Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, finds value in seemingly doomed or futile actions taken by oppressed peoples. Rosemarie Freeney Harding recalls the music that sustained the civil rights movement, and Paxus Calta-Star recounts the powerful vignette of an 18-year-old who launched the overthrow of Bulgaria's dictatorship. Many of the essays are new, others classic works that continue to inspire. Together, these writers explore a path of heartfelt community involvement that leads beyond despair to compassion and hope. The voices collected in The Impossible Will Take a Little While will help keep us all working for a better world despite the obstacles.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen and three other books. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He is an associated scholar at Seattle's Center for Ethical Leadership and lives in Seattle, Washington.

Reviews

In this uneven collection, Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time, gathers together over sixty poems, memoirs and essays tailored to buck up the spirits of a left-liberal audience depressed by the sorry state of the world. Although generally in favor of justice and democracy and against the "runaway global market," the selection of writers includes a wide range of environmentalists, civil rights crusaders, anti-poverty activists and dissidents against both fascism and communism. From these eclectic offerings some hopeful, albeit familiar themes assert themselves: ordinary people can make a difference, every little bit counts, in solidarity there is strength, a positive attitude is half the battle, the powers that be are unexpectedly vulnerable, and history is full of surprising victories of the weak over the strong. Not surprisingly, many of the pieces amount to motivational lectures, while others inflate the notion of hope into tiresome dilations on, for example, the links between information processing, daydreams and butterflies. But the articles that deal with concrete struggles and achievements—Nelson Mandela’s memoir of imprisonment on Robben Island, Vaclav Havel’s account of the ant-like construction of civil society and a dissident political culture in Communist Czechoslovakia, Bill McKibben’s homage to the urban planning triumphs of Curitiba, Brazil—deliver real inspiration.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465041663
• ISBN 13: 9780465041664
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 422
• Editor: Paul Rogat Loeb