Also in Politics & Social Justice

Getting a Grip

Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad

by Frances Moore Lappé

Praise

“Getting a Grip is not an ordinary book: it’s more like a new pair of glasses, allowing you to see everything around you with greater clarity. Suddenly the world is more comprehensible, more manageable, even more beautiful. You won’t want to take them off.”
—Barbara Kingsolver

Book Review
Tikkun Magazine
September/October 2007

Lappé [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 Lappé’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.
—David Belden

ForeWord Magazine
September/October 2007

In Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad, Frances Moore Lappé, author of the bestselling Diet for a Small Planet, reaffirms people's capacity for creating a good world out of the calamities—disease, poverty, animal extinction—endured by our current one. With plenty of anecdotes of how people, relying on their "basic sanity," successfully meet the challenges of globalism and world terrorism, the author has created a blueprint that shows the reader how to identify threats and how to respond to them in meaningful, practical ways.
—Karl Helicher