Interview with Anne Karpf, author of How Women Can Save The Planet
Anne Karpf, author of How Women Can Save The Planet recommends some fantastic books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Anne's book:
Review from Book Depository:
Here's a perverse truth: from New Orleans to Bangladesh, women--especially poor women of colour--are suffering most from a crisis they have done nothing to cause. Yet where, in environmental policy, are the voices of elderly European women dying in heatwaves? Of African girls dropping out of school due to drought? Our highest-profile climate activists are women and girls; but, at the top table, it's men deciding the earth's future.
(All affiliate links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
How Women Can Save The Planet
We're not all in it together--but we could be. Instead of expecting individual women to save the planet, what we need are visionary, global climate policies that are gender-inclusive and promote gender equality.
Anne Karpf shines a light on the radical ideas, compelling research and tireless campaigns, led by and for women around the world, that have inspired her to hope. Her conversations with female activists show how we can fight back, with strength in diversity. And, faced with the most urgent catastrophe of our times, she offers a powerful vision: a Green New Deal for Women.
Buy On:
Book Depository €18.29
Waterstones £14.99
Wordery $20.87
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Warning: I'm going to cheat madly throughout. Here by picking two titles, both of which I found inspiring when I wrote my last book, How to Age. The first is a slim book by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest, called Aging: The Fulfilment of Life. It isn't at all preachy or mushy (Nouwen was spiritual: he coined the phrase 'the wounded healer'). He links the dreadful way that we treat old people with our fear of ageing: "How can we be fully present to the elderly," he asks, " when we are hiding from our own aging?"
Review from Book Depository:
We are all aging. We are each a spoke on the great wheel of life, part of the ongoing cycle of growth. In Aging, Henri J.M. Nouwen and Walter J. Gaffney share some moving and inspirational thoughts on what aging means (and can mean) to all of us, whether we're in our youth, middle age, or later years.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review from Book Depository:
May Sarton-poet, novelist, and chronicler-occupies a special place in American letters. This new journal chronicles the year that began on May 3, 1982, her seventieth birthday. At her home in Maine, she savors "the experience of being alive in this beautiful place," reflecting on nature, friends, and work. "Why is it good to be old?" she was asked at one of her lectures. "Because," she said, "I am more myself than I have ever been."
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
A perfect companion volume is the American poet May Sarton's delicious journal At Seventy, where she celebrates this stage in her life, because "I am more myself than I have ever been." Almost every old person I know would raise a glass in agreement.
Aging: The Fulfillment of Life
Enhanced by some eighty-five photographs depicting various scenes from life and nature, this book shows how to make the later years a source of hope rather than a time of loneliness -- a way out of darkness into the light. Aging, the authors write, is not a reason for despair, but a basis of hope, not a slow decaying, but a gradual maturing, not a fate to be undergone but a chance to be embraced. And they remind us of our responsibility to incorporate the aged into the fabric of our own lives -- helping them become teachers again so they may help us repair the fragmented connections between generations.
Aging shows us all how to start fulfilling our lives by giving to others, so that when we leave this world, we can be what we have given. It is a warm, beautiful, and caring book: a simple reaffirmation of the promise of Him, who by His aging and death brought new life to this world.
Buy On:
Book Depository €12.61
Wordery $13.91
At Seventy : A Journal
Buy On:
Book Depository €19.54
Waterstones £16.49
Wordery $22.96
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
Sally Weintrobe is a psychoanalyst who has been thinking deeply - and freshly - about the climate crisis for a long time now. Her new book, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare, just published, is highly readable (lots of short, snappy sections) but is buzzing with insight, revelation and perception on every page. It gives you a new handle on how we got into this mess and how we get out of it.
Review From Book Depository:
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps us to recognise the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture - for example in the writings of Ayn Rand - and also in ourselves.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare
Sally Weintrobe argues that achieving the shift to greater care requires us to stop colluding with Exceptionalism, the rigid psychological mindset largely responsible for the climate crisis. People in this mindset believe that they are entitled to have the lion's share and that they can 'rearrange' reality with magical omnipotent thinking whenever reality limits these felt entitlements.
While this book's subject is grim, its tone is reflective, ironic, light and at times humorous. It is free of jargon, and full of examples from history, culture, literature, poetry, everyday life and the author's experience as a psychoanalyst, and a professional life that has been dedicated to helping people to face difficult truths.
Buy On:
Book Depository €26.62
Waterstones £21.99
Wordery $26.50
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
I'm going to cheat here again - I can't confine myself to just one. As a child, I enjoyed reading about girls who were feistier than me, like What Katy Did and Anne of Green Gables. When my children were small, I loved Burglar Bill (all the thrill of getting something for nothing - but then he gets remorseful so gives it all back) and Jill Murphy's glorious Five Minutes Peace: a book that sums up the feelings of exhausted mothers - everywhere but they're elephants so you don't need to feel too guilty...
Review From Book Depository:
All Mrs. Large wants is five minutes' peace from her energetic children, but chaos follows her all the way from the kitchen to the bath and back again. (All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Five Minutes' Peace
Buy On:
Easons €11.20
Book Depository €7.28
Waterstones £6.99
Wordery $7.73
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Paper always (and my millennial daughters feel the same way). I like to know how far in I am.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
For three decades (my final cheat) it was Primrose Hill Books, which was my brilliant local bookshop - we're still in touch. Now my local is The Owl Bookshop, a rich storehouse of treasures.
Many thanks to Anne for recommending some fantastic books! Please don't forget to check out Anne's book How Women Can Save The Planet.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd (How Women Can Save The Planet), Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc (Aging), WW Norton & Co (At Seventy), Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis), Walker Books Ltd (Five Mintes' Peace).
< Home
