Overview

Winner of the 2008 JAMES BEARD HUMANITARIAN AWARD, 2008 NAUTILUS SMALL PRESS GOLD AWARD and 2008 NAUTILUS SILVER AWARD in the category of Social Change/Activism Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad is a little book with a big message. Frances Moore Lappe--author of fifteen books, including three-million-copy bestseller Diet for a Small Planet--distills her world-spanning experience and wisdom in a conversational yet hard-hitting style to create a rare aha book. In nine short chapters, Lappe leaves readers feeling liberated and courageous. She flouts conventional right-versus-left divisions and affirms readers' basic sanity--their intuitive knowledge that it is possible to stop grasping at straws and grasp the real roots of today's crises, from hunger and poverty to climate change and terrorism. Because we are creatures of the mind, says Lappe, it is the power of frame --our core assumptions about how the world works--that determines outcomes. She pinpoints the dominant failing frame now driving out planet toward disaster. By interweaving fresh insights, startling facts, and stirring vignettes of ordinary people pursuing creative solutions to our most pressing global problems, Lappe uncovers a new, empowering frame through which real solutions are emerging worldwide. She writes: My book's intent is to enable us to see what is happening all around us but is still invisible to most of us. It is about people in all walks of life who are penetrating the spiral of despair and reversing it with new ideas, ingenious innovation--and courage.

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9780979414244

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Reviews

Tikkun Magazine - <br>Lappe [gives]--plenty of examples of people making change in whatever system they inhabit by bringing stakeholders together irrespective of their initial opinions or class status. The necessary ingredients include a passion to change things, a freedom from too much ideology, a readiness to both enter into conflict and to mediate it through the kind of facilitation that enables people to hear each other's real needs, and the learning of partnership and communication skills--The best part of Lappe's book to me was when she suggested a whole new vocabulary for us to use--It's a fresh look constructed by an original mind, a woman who is grappling with real life problems worldwide and who is pragmatic and out-of-the-box in seeing where entry points for change can be made. If this book isn't inspirational and helpful, then I don't know what is. But it isn't an all-encompassing theory. It isn't a Das Capital to set an agenda for economic research and idealistic policy wonks for a hundred years. That may be just as well, for pragmatic compassion and cooperative innovation with no pre-set limits may be just what we need.

An absolute must-read! Very inspiring and empowering. It makes you want to jump out of your seat and do something that will better our world. --Lina Musayev, Co-founder of United Students for Fair Trade<br><br>

Author Information

Frances Moore Lappe is the author or co-author of 15 books, beginning with the 1971 three-million-copy Diet for a Small Planet. She is co-founder of the Institute for Food & Development Policy (Food First), the Center for Living Democracy, and the Small Planet Institute.

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