Protest!, a book that’s not as divisive as you think, but is too broad

Protest! How People Have Come Together to Change the World takes a wide-angle look at protests over the course of history. It’s by Alice & Emily Haworth-Booth and it’s not as divisive as it could be, but is also not a reference book on what to do if things aren’t going your way or you’re being legitimately repressed. In short, if you’ve protested about more than one topic over the past 25 years then this book will be speaking to the choir, if not, it’ll provide an interesting overview on how discourse started.   

The earlier parts of Protest! are much more engaging because they touch on aspects of history that middle school readers and more, probably aren’t familiar with. For example, later on, during the rule of Ramses III many of his workers simply stopped working. It was the first sit-down protest in history and made the boy king reevaluate how he’d have to govern.

Protest! is conveniently broken up into 12 sections, with one having a slightly different angle that’s dissected between time and location. The text is written at a level that middle school audiences will be able to read and comprehend all of it, plus it’s loaded with illustrations and a very bright neon cover.

As an older reader, I read parts of Protest! with a large grain of, please tell us the rest of the story, but that’s not the purpose of the book. This is a book that is not meant to be a reference book. If you’re a middle school student who already has an opinion about certain issues, wants that reinforced, and to learn about similar issues, this is your jam.

Speaking of jam, recently there was a traffic jam because some protesters sat down in the middle of one of Rome’s busiest roads. That tactic is part of the No Action is Too Radical movement that’s part of the Extinction Rebellion which was a global movement that started in  2018. Apparently, I missed my invitation to the Extinction Rebellion party. That final chapter in the book waters down some of the seriousness of the other protests. For example, it’s challenging to compare Greta Thunberg to the fall of the Berlin Wall, resisting Nazism, the Suffragette movement or Tiananmen Square. Her commitment to that cause and its awareness certainly need to be shared, but aligning them with those is a bridge too far for many readers.

As a middle school book, that’s the challenging part of Protest! It provides a thumbnail view of many pivotal moments in history, as well as the movements that made them happen. However, by placing them all on a level playing field it minimizes how atrocious some of them really were, or are. And from a historical perspective, some of the things mentioned in Protest! don’t hold a candle to things that are really happening.

Protest! How People Have Come Together to Change the World is by Alice & Emily Haworth-Booth and available on Pavilion Books Company Limited.

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