Publisher's Weekly Review
This photo-filled book of the 2017 Women's March offers a vivid account of the conception, planning, and staging of the massive demonstration in Washington, D.C. In a patchwork quilt of firsthand accounts, the narrative details the collective grassroots efforts that went into obtaining permits, booking speakers, and arriving at a joint vision for the tone and messaging of the march. In addition to contributions by the event's organizers, the book features essays by a number of notable figures, including cultural critic Roxane Gay, actor America Ferrera, and Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Elaine Welteroth. Readers who took part in the march will recognize the burgeoning, organic energy that drew so many people to participate. Aerial photos of seas of pink hats capture the scope of the event, while portraits of proud marchers holding signs that read "hope," "love," and "defend dignity" capture its immediacy. The authors deliver a sense that the march came about because of a perfect storm of circumstances, a confluence of energy and collective outrage, yet it's clear in the sections concerning the event's impact that it was also the galvanizing start of a movement. In commemorating this momentous day, the book also serves as a blueprint for 21st-century protests. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the year since the Women's March on Washington (and simultaneous marches around the globe), the organizers of the historic event have come together to share their experiences and the lessons they've learned in the time since Donald Trump's inauguration. This book is a collection of photos and oral histories that expertly blends the larger-than-life power of the movement and small-scale moments shared among the women in charge. The contributors reveal what it was like to be parents, lovers, and daughters during this charged time and graciously admit to the fear and skepticism many felt before the march. The book gives readers a picture of the diverse organizers behind the movement, reminding all that this event would not have been so successful without extreme intersectionality. Interspersed between the organizers' narratives are accounts of the day from women all over the world, explaining how that show of dissent impacted their lives, and notes from celebrities like America Ferrera, Roxane Gay, and Jill Solloway detailing their own views of the march. Large and plentiful photos show many shades of hope and inclusion in this energizing and emotional trip through the movement.--Eathorne, Courtney Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LET US REVIEW what is so good about Denis Johnson. I have often performed this exercise, with a modicum of writerly envy, over the decades of reading his work: What exactly is the alchemical magic in these pages? Everyone who started writing seriously in the 1980s or 1990s can tell you where he or she first consumed the morsels that eventually made up "Jesus' Son," Johnson's breakthrough 1992 story collection. To behold those lines for the first time was to see language unaccountably capturing emotions in a way unfamiliar in recent American prose. Johnson once noted that he was working under the star of Isaac Babel while writing "Jesus' Son," and it showed; just as Babel saw (for example) the Russian sunset as others had not previously, Johnson transformed his misfits and heroin addicts until they became like protagonists from the time of epics. "Angels," Johnson's 1983 debut novel, was similarly revelatory - making the homely backdrop of a Greyhound bus journey suddenly appropriate to the highest American literature. If Johnson sometimes stumbled in later books (he was prolific), they were exceptions in a long, restless and varied career that included not only fiction but plays, nonfiction and some impressive poetry collections. (I recommend "The Incognito Lounge.") What made the effective books so effective? In part, it is the consciousness of mortality found everywhere in his best work. This is the guy, after all, who wrote "Resuscitation of a Hanged Man" and "Already Dead." It is the rare Denis Johnson work that doesn't explicitly take up end-of-life questions. From the death-row sequences of "Angels" to the murder and car crashes and heroin addiction of "Jesus' Son" to the Vietnam War setting of "Tree of Smoke," his 2007 National Book Award-winning novel, there is ever a wafting of mortal fumes across Johnson's paragraphs. "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden," Johnson's new and presumably final collection - he died from liver cancer in May - is no outlier. Without exception the five stories that make up this volume, averaging about 40 pages each, feature intimations of mortality. There's the former wife of the adman narrator, in the title story, who telephones to tell our man she's dying, but without specifying which former wife she is. ("In the middle of this," he notes, "I began wondering, most uncomfortably, in fact with a dizzy, sweating anxiety, if I'd made a mistake.") There are the murderous, delusional inmates of a county lockup in "Strangler Bob," and the fanciful and grim formulations about Elvis and his lost twin that haunt "Doppelgänger, Poltergeist," the last story in the volume. Throughout is Johnson's familiar anguish at our passing over. What makes "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" different is that in this case Johnson knew his own time was short, and embarked on his material with an admirable and pitiless openness he conveys through his characters: "It's plain to you that at the time I wrote this, I'm not dead," one says. "But maybe by the time you read it." The movement across the whole of the collection echoes Dante: down, concentrically, into the revelations of illness and death, to "the phase in which these visits to emergency rooms and clinics increased in frequency and by now have become commonplace." Before it gets there, though, it sets the mood, beginning with the title story and its apparently unrelated fragments - some of them about advertising and some featuring blunt episodes of sex and death like something out of a late 1960s Jerzy Kosinski novel. This is followed by a weaker set piece about rehab, "The Starlight on Idaho"; reading it, I worried that the presumably ill and suffering author was too consumed with his difficulties to reach his most fertile core. But then comes "Strangler Bob," in which Dink, the narrator (all of the stories are in the first person), tries to reckon not only with his reduced circumstances but with a prophecy, courtesy of his cellmate in county lockup, that he and two felonious acquaintances will one day commit a murder. It's all very fun and strange, with glimmers of the old Johnson at work. And then that Johnson breaks through in a big way, in a story boldly and maybe hopefully titled "Triumph Over the Grave," and suddenly every mild reservation you might have had is forgotten. Suddenly, with exceptional luminosity, there is an unveiling. "Triumph" begins as a journal entry in a slightly stiff present tense, but then tumbles backward into a story within the story about a fellow writer the narrator (who is not quite Johnson himself, but certainly a near relation) knew in Austin, Tex., during a time of teaching creative writing. Thus the story becomes a powerful vehicle for recollections about the author's own complex life in literature: "I've gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It's not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie - although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don't get back where you came from for years and years." In dispatching the poor writer from Texas, "Triumph Over the Grave" turns to three recitations of loss, each painfully exacting. And it closes with a startlingly beautiful bedside reunion of two long-divorced lovers. The story, both ingenious and exceedingly well composed, rehabilitates literature for us, exposing its purpose anew, which, it seems to me, is precisely to cast in language the nature of being, and to leave some of this language behind for those who would have a trail of bread crumbs through the darkness. "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden," as a volume, drills down into and through what is tolerable until it hits a powerful vein of the painfully mortal and lasting. If it ends with a yawp of tragicomedy in the Elvis Presley story, "Doppelgänger, Poltergeist," it's only to remind us that Dante, too, was a toiler in the comedic fields, no matter how brutal and austere his triune cosmogony. The problem with a posthumous book is that it's hard to see the work clearly for the tragedy that orbits it. This is especially true when the author is recently deceased, or has died abruptly. The death haunts the text and prevents us from freely roaming it to draw our own conclusions; instead, we see in every exchange the hand of fate. But in "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden," Denis Johnson tries to comfort us about his impending absence, and to use his stunning gift for revelation - truly his singular skill - to brighten the interiors of tragedy and help us wave off the vultures hovering above. It need not, as he says, be so sad: "Life after death, ghosts, Paradise, eternity - of course, we take all that as granted. Otherwise where's the fun?" 'Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light.' RICK MOODY is the author, most recently, of the novel "Hotels of North America." He teaches at Brown University.
School Library Journal Review
This oral history of the 2017 Women's March allows the organizers to tell their story "so that no historian, pundit, or politician could claim what was ours." Opening with election night and an idea posted to Facebook, this title follows the efforts that went into making the march happen, with emphasis placed on the women of color involved in leadership and the work done to ensure the march would be intersectional. It chronicles the day of the Women's March, which ended up being the "single largest protest in world history," with five million participants on all seven continents. The volume is heavily illustrated with large, compelling photographs of the planning and the marches. Pullout boxes and pages let others share their memories and reflect. While the format lends the text an unvarnished intimacy, it does not allow for context. The organizers own up to mistakes and offer rebuttals to some of the criticisms of the march (for instance, a lack of inclusivity), but the book assumes that readers remember those missteps and the larger conversations around them. VERDICT The high-profile rise in teen activism makes this engaging account a solid choice for general collections.-Jennifer Rothschild, Arlington County Public Libraries, VA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Moving photographs and essays celebrate a powerful protest.Hoping to revive the energy and commitment of the Women's March on Washington of Jan. 21, 2017, the organizers have compiled a profusely illustrated volume of interviews, commentary, and essays, documenting the complex process of making the event a reality and the impact of participating. After Donald Trump's election, one woman in Hawaii, feeling despondent and hopeless, posted an idea on Facebook: "I think we should march," she wrote, immediately gaining the attention of a few dozen friends. By the next morning, 10,000 women had signed on, and the number began to grow, with other groups in several cities making plans independently. Then a few experienced organizers jumped in as coordinators. Immediately, it generated controversy. Black women objected to the name, which recalled the 1997 Million Woman March, focused on "uniting and empowering women of color." The name was quickly changed, and inclusion became vital to planning and participation; soon the initial organizers learned the significance of terms such as "intersectional," "white privilege," and "racial justice." Devising the Women's March platform meant being sensitive to the concerns of Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reformers as well as those of immigrant, Native-American, LGBTQ, and disabled communities. Social justice activists, politicians, strategists, and diverse members of the arts community all contributed as planners under the auspices of the nonprofit Gathering for Justice, an organization started by Harry Belafonte. It soon became clear that the Women's March was igniting resistance throughout the world. More than 3 million people marched across the United States (1 million in Washington, D.C.) and 5 million worldwide. On the National Mall, organizers were stunned when they looked out over the massive crowd. Eloquent essays and comments by participants, including celebrities such as Ashley Judd, America Ferrara, Maxine Waters, and New Yorker editor David Remnick, speak to their deep emotional response to the march. Urging continued activism, the editors offer a list of organizations in which to get involved.An inspiring commemoration of a historic event. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The organizers of the women's march here collaborate with publisher Condé Nast to create a lavishly illustrated look back at the January 21, 2016, event released in time for its first anniversary. Insistently multivocal, this collage of oral histories is narrated by the organizers, with personal essays by both high-profile and everyday marchers, and includes a rich collection of images from women's marches from across the globe. Organized in three broad sections, this book explores how the protest came together, the event itself, and the organizers' efforts to support participants' political engagement in the weeks and months that followed. The final section provides a directory of organizations through which readers can take action. The result is a work that resists developing a single authoritative account of the march and instead shares a multitude of stories and images that together become a whole. VERDICT This book will lend itself to casual browsing as well as a more serious study of successful, intersectional grassroots organizing.-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.