All Is Not Lost

20 Ways to Revolutionize Disaster

By: Alex Zamalin

Narrated by: Chris Baetens

An uplifting look at how organizers in the past have successfully leveraged crises into emancipatory politics, and a plea for continued progressive movement building in our tumultuous social climate

From the climate apocalypse and COVID-19 to double-digit unemployment to Donald Trump and the rise of far-right white nationalists—disasters are everywhere we look.

While these disasters often leave us feeling hopeless and withdrawn, scholar Alex Zamalin argues that pessimism cannot be the only response. Silence and inaction only perpetuate mass suffering and inequality. Instead, All Is Not Lost suggests that following every crisis emerges new political opportunity for changing our politics and everyday lives.

Blending intellectual history, biography, and political critique, Zamalin offers 20 specific lessons for our present moment, turning to moments in history to demonstrate how various figures in the past have successfully leveraged struggles into sources of political action and freedom. The lessons—on how to resist, organize, treat others, think politically, memorialize, dream, write, occupy, build, and act—all build toward one truth: though disaster is something we cannot prevent from arriving, we can control how we confront it and what we build in its place. Using examples from the 17th century to the present, All Is Not Lost reminds listeners to not back down in the face of crisis and offers radical lessons of continued resistance and movement building to create a successful progressive coalition.

©2022 Alex Zamalin (P)2022 Beacon Press

Critic reviews

“A [fiery], earnest effort to inspire progressives to regain the political initiative now apparently firmly in conservative hands.”—Kirkus Reviews

“In the wake of the wreckage of the Trump era and pandemic, relief is widespread, but so too is a sense of hopelessness. This book is a call to action, a must-read.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

“Many of these remarkable stories from our history will be new to readers—which is sad in a way, since they are important chapters that have been ignored (or erased). But it’s a joy in another way, because their fresh power will inspire many to action!”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature