Book Corner
We welcome your reviews of books that • were published within the past three years • do not advocate for a political party or politician • do address issues supported by the League, and • intrigued you enough that you want to share them. Please submit your review at any time to Margan and Thad Zajdowicz (Margan.Zajdowicz [at] gmail.com).
Eyes to the Wind
A Memoir of Love and Death, Hope and Resistance
By Ady Barkan
In his inspiring and heartbreaking memoir, Ady Barkan takes us on two journeys: one about becoming “the most influential progressive activist in the country,” according to Politico; and the second about receiving and coming to terms with a diagnosis of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). These two narratives are intertwined throughout the memoir, each simultaneously informing and extending the other.
The book’s foreword, written by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaks to the depth and reach of Barkan’s progressive activism. Barkan uses many flashbacks to retell his path to political engagement—a how-to on becoming an activist. Although always a bit of a political junkie, he actively engages in social justice causes during his senior year at Columbia University. He hones his commitments, philosophies, and advocacy skills while in law school at Yale and as a law clerk in the Southern District of New York. As a lawyer at the Center for Popular Democracy, he is the founding director of two major projects: Local Progress and the Fed Up campaign. He finds his passion not in the courtroom but in arguing policy and organizing protests.
The book opens in the fall of 2016, shortly after his first wedding anniversary with his partner since college, Rachel King. At age thirty-two, they are, as he puts it, “the happiest and luckiest people we knew”: He enjoys long runs on the beach and fighting hard for issues of economic justice; she is a new professor at UC Santa Barbara; and they are the proud parents of a cheery four-month-old son. This idyllic life is shattered when a little numbness in his left hand, thought to be carpal tunnel syndrome, becomes the devastating diagnosis of ALS, most likely with fewer than four more years to live.
Barkan’s honest retelling of this tragic turnaround in his life is brutal, insightful, self-indulgent, and inspired. He processes his shock into a renewed focus on fighting for social justice, particularly in health care, issues with which he has become all too familiar. Despite his rapidly declining physical abilities, Barkan makes a six-week cross-country tour to support Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, believing that we can always make a difference. Barkan is at his most powerful when juxtaposing his sweeping policy arguments and visons for a better, stronger democracy with the insights from small personal moments like holding his son, getting his wheelchair stuck in the mud, or turning to his father for advice.
On a personal note, Ady is one of our own. I first met him when he was ten and his parents moved in next door to us in Altadena. Ady went to elementary school in Pasadena and high school in Pomona. Since completing the memoir in January 2019, he has testified before Congress (through an electronic voice) and interviewed leading presidential candidates (on YouTube, Uncovered: Conversations with Ady Barkan). Ever hopeful for the future of our country, Ady and Rachel welcomed a second child in November 2019.
—Dawn P. Dawson
