Actions Speak Loudest: Keeping Our Promise for a Better World by Robert McKinnon, Juan Williams

From the Publisher

Ideas, images, and actions to change our children’s future—
with contributions by household names and everyday heroes

Throughout my life I have witnessed ordinary Americans involved in extraordinary acts of service. Collectively, these individual acts build momentum and become a movement for lasting change. I encourage everyone who reads these pages to think about how you can do something big or small to make a difference in your house, on your block, in your community, or throughout the world.

—Alma Powell, Chair, America’s Promise Alliance

 

Actions Speak Loudest is a unique user’s guide to making a change. The photographs themselves are inspirational. Together with the essays and the “action” guides, they create a starting point for lifting the American spirit and stirring people to take a risk, make a sacrifice. The key idea is to shift the pessimism found in the poll numbers that suggest Americans are getting comfortable with the idea that our children will not have a better life than the current generation.
If you have this book in your hand you are a dangerous American. You have a tool for radical action to make our great country even greater for the greatest gift—our children.
—from the Foreword by Juan Williams

Publishers Weekly

In this essay collection, a crowd of professionals and activists working to improve the world (including Queen Noor, Dave Eggers, Newt Gingrich, and Rachel Ray) each comment on an issue, and suggest concrete ways readers can make a difference in four arenas of action: world, country, community and home. The volume begins, ambitiously enough, with a typically spirited President Jimmy Carter addressing world peace; his list of actions include teaching children that true strength doesn't come from violence or aggression, celebrating International Day of Peace (9/21) in our communities, and "asking your representatives the hard questions." ("Hold them accountable for the conflicts we enter as a nation.") Some of the most absorbing essays are written by ordinary citizen-activists: Richard Castaldo, who was shot at Columbine ten years ago, suggests that readers take reporting violence, especially in schools, seriously ("Eighty percent of victimizations go unreported"). Though some accounts are instantly forgettable, the best evoke genuine outrage, such as the story told by Children's Health Fund co-founder Irwin Redlener, about a homeless eight-year-old identified as "learning disabled" when his real diagnosis, tragically, was an untreated cleft palate, noted but neglected at infancy. This broad primer on the world's issues, big-scale and small, works as a useful gadfly for social change, appropriate for students and any neophyte do-gooder.
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Actions Speak Loudest is a user’s guide to making a change. The photographs, by themselves, are inspirational. With the essays and the “action” guides, they create a starting point for lifting the American spirit and stirring people to take a risk, make a sacrifice.

This book is in keeping with the American heritage of Paul Revere and his “Call to Action” for true citizens to defend the promise of America. The key idea is to shift the pessimism found in the poll numbers that suggest Americans are getting comfortable with the idea that our children will not have a better life than the current generation.

If you have this book in your hand you are a dangerous American. You have a tool for radical action to make our great country even greater for the greatest gift—our children.

—from the Foreword by Juan Williams