AVAILABILITY: Usually ships within 2-5 days

Publication Date: 2007
Publisher: Small Planet Media
Binding: Paperback
Topics: s, Climate Change, Democracy: Theory & Practice, Labor & Work / Classism, Militarism, Population / Consumption, Social Movements, Sustainable Community, Visioning the Future

Description: '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 our 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."

Review(s): "I love 'Getting a Grip'...great positive energy that awakens us to a whole new way to think and to act. Read it now." - Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, author of 'Failing the Faithful'

"A terrific book - clear and handy. The author accompanies the reader and the ideas are metabolizeable. It is smart and not intimidating." - Kaethe Weingarten, author of 'Common Shock', Harvard Medical School

The September/October issue of Tikkun Magazine included a rousing review by managing editor David Belden. Belden describes Lappé as one of the "midwives at the rebirth of radical hope."

"'Getting a Grip is "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....

"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...

"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."