Product Description

What keeps us going when times get tough? How do we act to create a more humane world, no matter how hard it seems? How do we offer models of involvement for our students when many feel their actions cannot matter? The Impossible Will Take a Little While gathers stories and essays of engagement that range across nations, eras, and political movements. These visionary and eloquent voices include Diane Ackerman, Sherman Alexie, Maya Angelou, Mary Catherine Bateson, Ariel Dorfman, Marian Wright Edelman, Eduardo Galeano, Susan Griffin, V‡clav Havel, Seamus Heaney, Tony Kushner, Jonathan Kozol, Bill McKibben, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Neruda, Henri Nouwen, Arundhati Roy, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Cornel West, Terry Tempest Williams, and Howard Zinn. Their voices can help us all keep working for a better world, despite the obstacles. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77008 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-17
• Released on: 2004-08-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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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Review
"A shot in the arm for all of us who feel withered by crisis and paralyzed with cynicism...." -- Aretha Williams, San Antonio Express News, Sept 12 2005

"A stirring collection of essays aimed at people who still want to believe that ordinary people can change the world." -- Atlanta Journal Constitution, October 30, 2004

"An anthology of some of the most powerful voices of our time." -- Boston Globe, Oct 3 2004

"An indispensable anthology of hope. Put away your Prozac, and pick up The Impossible Will Take a Little While." -- Arianna Huffington

"Deeply moving and motivating... a retinue to be reckoned with from those dedicated to the concept of a better world" -- Baltimore Sun, Jan 2, 2005

"Hopeful, inspiring, and motivating... May well be required reading for us all." -- Sierra Club magazine, December 2004

"Paul Loeb brings hope for a better world in a time when we so urgently need it." -- Millard Fuller, founder, Habitat for Humanity

"This book can even make one hopeful about the future despite so many signs to the contrary." -- Bill Moyers

"This might possibly be the most important collection of stories and essays you will ever read." -- History Channel top-10 2004 political book list, November 2004

"Will resonate with anyone struggling with despair and doubt." -- Dallas Morning News, Nov. 30, 2004

From the Author
Everywhere I go in the country, people ask me if their efforts can really matter. I wrote this book to give people hope—drawing together some of the finest engaged writers in the world to explore what keeps us going in difficult times.

People say the book will be tremendously helpful for helping ordinary citizens replenish the wellsprings of their commitment and keep working for justice in this hard political time.

I've included pieces that explore the historical, political, ecological and theological frameworks that help us to persist—with concrete examples of how people have faced and overcome despair. Some directly address our current politics. Others examine how people persisted in the struggles of the past: what it was like to confront South African apartheid, Eastern Europe’s Communist dictatorships, or Mississippi's entrenched segregation.

Political hope and personal hope are intertwined, of course. What lets us work for change is related to what keeps us going day after day when our personal lives get difficult. So some pieces straddle both. But I’ve focused on the kind of hope that takes us beyond merely personally surviving and carving out the best private life we can. I believe The Impossible Will Take a Little While can help readers find common solutions and see the world clear-eyed—acknowledging the destructive power of greed, fear, and shortsighted expedience, resisting the temptations of complacency and sentimentality, yet continuing nonetheless, to work for change, remembering that hope, in the words of one of my authors, is acting in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change.

I think you’ll enjoy the book