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  • The Century of the Old

    In April 2010, Fred Pearce wrote an essay for The New Scientist titled "The Shock of the Old," which he adapted from his new book, The Coming Population Crash. In the essay Fred wrote that "of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now."

    Something about that fact struck a chord with readers and, almost instantly, the phrase was being quoted, tweeted, retweeted, blogged, and forwarded all over the web. From well known writers and journalists to enthusiastic readers, it seemed everyone was moved to share this surprising information about our aging society.

    In this video, Fred Pearce tries to answer the question of why this particular phrase made such an impact on people, and what an aging society will mean for our future.

     

     

    Beginning today, Pearce will be taking part in a forum discussion about population issues, hosted by Mother Jones. To take part in the conversation, click here and leave a question for Fred Pearce or one of the other experts (including another Beacon Press author, Courtney E. Martin) weighing in on the issue.

  • Department of Congratulations!

    Beacon Press staff and associates took home honors at the 53rd Annual New England Book Show, presented by Bookbuilders of Boston. Kudos on the design teamwork that produced David Plante's gorgeous new book, The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief. Jacket Designer: Bob Kosturko. Text Designer: Susan E. Kelly, Wilsted and Taylor Publishing Services. Production Coordinator: Sarah Laxton.

     

    New England Book Show Award-Winner: The Pure Lover by David Plante http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=31158139&access_key=key-1983r8w83xz92gqz3gl4&page=1&viewMode=list

  • A Poet Lifts Her Voice in Honor of Dr. Dorothy Irene Height

    We invite you to spend some time with Sonia Sanchez, the award-winning poet whom Maya Angelou called, "a lion in literature's forest." Find poems, upcoming events, and a warm note of welcome from the poet at her new website. You can read about Sanchez's recent appearance at the 10th annual National Black Writers' Conference over at Essence.com.

    In tribute to Dr. Dorothy Irene Height, Essence.com has a beautiful feature here, including this testament by Sanchez:

    "She was an amazing woman to travel with, so full of
    information that you just sat next to her and opened up your pores to receive
    the wisdom. What I think is important for people to understand about Dr. Height
    is that she was an intellectual, along with being a woman who got things done.
    She worked very hard and organized but she did it with intellect. Imagine the
    meeting between God and Dr. Height when she says all the things that she did on
    this earth."

    Selected from the poem 9 haiku

    (for Freedom's Sisters)


    (Dr. Dorothy Irene Height)


        I
    your words
    helped us reconnoiter
    the wonder of women

        II
    woman sequestered
    in the hurricane
    of herstory…


    Sanchez, Sonia. "9 haiku (for Freedom's Sisters)." Morning Haiku. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010. Please do not distribute this work without permission. You may submit requests to reprint the work of Sonia Sanchez from titles published by Beacon Press through its website.

  • Happy Mother’s Day! And happy Mother’s Day!

    Today's post is from Amie Klempnauer Miller, a frequent speaker about gay and lesbian families and author of the book She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Nonbiological Lesbian) Motherhood. Miller works as a development consultant to the public media industry and lives with her partner and daughter in St. Paul, Minnesota.

    "Mother's Day is my favorite holiday," my daughter Hannah says to me one morning. I don't believe her for a minute. I know that Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday because we drive from our home in Minnesota to southern Indiana where all of her cousins live, so that she can spend 48 glorious hours gorging on whipped cream with pumpkin pie and playing hide-and-seek with the other girls. But I'm packing her lunch and she wants me to put in a piece of candy. I grant two points and a bite-size Snickers for a savvy pitch.

    Whether she's just angling for a treat or not, it's a good thing that she claims to feel this way. Mother's Day is a twofer in our home. Father's Day, on the other hand, doesn't much register, since there is no father here. We are a nuclear family with a twist: two moms, one kid. We do pretty much what other families do on Mother's Day, I suppose, but twice over.

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  • Link Roundup: Happy Mother’s Day Weekend

    In honor of Mother's Day on May 9th, we'll start this weekend's book news with the Trebing family, which was recently featured on "The View." One of Beth Whitehouse's former students at Columbia Journalism School takes us into the family history at the heart of The Match, asking, "Would you make a baby to save a baby?"

    Mary Oliver is one of Maria Shriver's "favorite poets of all time." Watch as Shriver reads her favorite poem—then tell us in the comments if you have your own. You can hear Oliver read her work on the new audio collection Many Miles, which listeners in Louisiana have been enjoying recently.

    Fred Pearce tells the Washington Post's Political Bookworm about "The Coming Need for Immigrants." You can also hear him on CNN International (catch Fred starting at the 5:20 mark).

    The Rochester City Paper talks immigrants' rights and Arizona with Tucson journalist Margaret Regan. More about The Death of Josseline at the Arizona Daily Star.

    Jonathan Metzl's "Essential Read" on how "How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease" is getting a lot of attention over at Psychology Today.

    The rumors are true! Boston University Law Professor Jay Wexler, representing Beacon Press, became Literary Death Match Champion last month. With nattily attired Todd Zuniga hosting, the always excellent Pagan Kennedy joining the celebrity judges, and a floor hockey shootout that wasn't to be missed, our congratulations goes to Opium Magazine. Those who did miss it can read Wexler's victory lap, with links to photos, here, and a video of him reading here.

    Congratulations are also due to Patricia Harman, author of the memoir The Blue Cotton Gown. Harman has just won the Denny C. Plattner award for Outstanding Nonfiction from Berea College for "Dorothy's Urn," which ran in Appalachian Heritage. You can read the piece as a PDF here.

    Last—but nowhere near least—we're proud to highlight the work of former Beacon staff member Nellie Bellows, whose lyric essay "To Satisfy This Demand for Salt There Is First of All the Sea" makes for beautiful reading over at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.

  • Fran Hawthorne: Green Advice Books and Reality

    Fran Hawthorne is the author of The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting,and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism. Hawthorne has been a writer or editor at Fortune, BusinessWeek, Institutional Investor, and other publications. She is the author of three books on health care and investing, including Inside the FDA and the award-winning Pension Dumping.

    It's bad enough to walk into a library or bookstore and confront shelf after shelf of books with titles like True Green: 100 Everyday Ways You Can Contribute to a Healthier Planet. And The Little Green Book of Shopping: 250 Tips for an Eco Lifestyle. And 1001 Ways to Save the Earth.

    I am immediately consumed with guilt. How can I possibly manage to do ONE HUNDRED things every day for the environment – let alone TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY or ONE THOUSAND AND ONE? My God, I'd better start immediately.

    Still, I assume that each of those 100 or 250 or 1001 things are actions that a reasonable person could do one by one, if not en masse. Then I start reading the lists.

    And I have to start wondering if the people who write these books actually live on the planet they claim to be saving.

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  • How NAFTA Produced Mexican Migration

    By David Bacon

    Beginning around 1980, the World Bank and the IMF began imposing a one-size-fits-all formula for development, called structural adjustment programs. These required borrowing countries to adopt a package of economic reforms, such as privatization, ending subsidies and price controls, trade liberalization, and reduced worker protections. After more than two decades, there is no strong evidence that this approach has achieved its stated goal of stimulating growth, while the toll on working people has been staggering. The IRCA commission report acknowledged the potential for harm by noting that "efforts should be made to ease transitional costs in human suffering."

    The North American Free Trade Agreement, however, was not intended to relieve human suffering.

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  • Testimonies from the Desert: What’s behind our Standard of Living?

    Today's post is from Aviva Chomsky, professor of history and coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State College. The author of several books—including her latest, "They Take Our Jobs!" And 20 Other Myths About Immigration—Chomsky has been active in Latin American solidarity and immigrants' rights issues for over twenty-five years. 

    In early March I spoke about immigration rights in a colleague's class at Salem State. "We can't be expected to take care of all the world's needy people," one student protested. "If we let in everybody who wanted to come, we couldn't maintain our standard of living here."

    A week later I was on the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, collecting testimonies from migrants who had been captured in the Arizona desert and deported back across the border. Dazed, exhausted and dehydrated, they hobbled on raw, blistered feet and clutched small plastic bags stamped "Homeland Security" that held all of their worldly possessions. Although my supposed task was to document abuses by the U.S. border patrol, most migrants had more pressing hopes when I approached them. "Can you help me get in? Could you adopt me?"

    The student's words haunted me just as the mass of dispossessed humanity haunted me, just as the barbed-wire-topped wall that slices in half the city of Nogales haunted me, during the week I spent there.

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  • Spring Planting: Generations in the Garden

    Today's post is from Alexis Rizzuto, the editor of nature and environmental books at Beacon Press.

     

    In spring every gardener's fancy turns to thoughts of planting. But I cannot write about my own garden without first writing about my great-grandmother's. Though I never met that remarkable Sicilian, and her garden had become a parking lot by the time I was born, I long nonetheless for the place she made.

     

    Biaggia Rizzo left Sicily in 1911 with her husband Salvatore, and settled in Malden, now a densely packed suburb of Boston, but then considered "the country." There, they bought a parcel of land with a small house on it. They added a third storey (for extended family), built a huge greenhouse, planted an orchard, and began cultivating the land, as they had in their home country. They also raised rabbits and chickens.

     

    Salvatore died a few years later, leaving Biaggia to raise their only child—my five-year-old grandmother Josephine—on her own. From then on, she supported them both through the work of her hands. She grew vegetable and herb seedlings in the greenhouse, to sell and to plant. She raised peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, cauliflower, string beans, celery, eggplant, parsley, basil. And as my grandmother remembered, "Everything she planted seemed to thrive."

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  • Link Roundup: Defending Immigrant Rights from Arizona to Manhattan

    This past week, Beacon authors have been very active out in the world, putting a human face on immigration and talking topics spanning a wide gamut of social justice issues, including: global population, feminism, consumer choices, education, and so much more. Visit our homepage to see the many books on immigrant rights that Beacon has published. And, if you're in or around Boston, learn more about the May Day March, which will begin on Boston Common at noon on Saturday.

    Tucson journalist Margaret Regan takes on Arizona's new immigration law that ignores the escalating number of migrant deaths for the Washington Post's The Political Bookworm.

    Danielle Ofri's article "Immigrants, patients have unique stories" is up on CNN.com. Ofri is the author of Medicine in Translation: Journeys with My Patients.

    WNBC New York talks to Stacy and Steve Trebing about their successful struggle to save their daughter with a "savoir sibling." The family's moving story is chronicled by author Beth Whitehouse in her new book The Match.

    Author Bob Moses champions a constitutional amendment to guarantee quality education, the topic of his forthcoming book Quality Education as a Constitutional Right, in The Nation article about the 50th anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

    Today marks the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Hear Dana Sachs talk about the nearly 3,000 "supposedly orphaned" children swept into "Operation Babylift" on NHPR's "Word of Mouth."

    Fran Hawthorne, author of The Overloaded Liberal, talks to U.S. News & World Report about the environmentally-aware consumer's struggle to make everyday choices.

    After Fred Pearce appeared on "The Daily Show" to talk about The Coming Population Crash, the conversation about how women are on track to save the planet continued over at Jezebel. And Andrew Sullivan of "The Daily Dish" linked to Fred's much commented upon interview for Salon.com.

    In her excellent piece on "Tea and Sympathy," Jill Lepore mentions historian Alfred F. Young's "The Shoemaker and the Tea Party" in this week's New Yorker.