[Welcome author Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon.net), and Host SharkFu (angryblackbitch.com).]

Get Opinionated: A Progressive’s Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking a Little Action)

When I was invited to host a FDL Book Salon for Amanda Marcotte’s new book Get Opinionated! I was thrilled!

I’ve known Amanda for years, but never had a chance to chat with her about her writing. The added bonus is that Get Opinionated! is about a subject near and dear to my heart – individual activism and finding your progressive voice.

Fantabulous!

Get Opinionated: A Progressive’s Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking a Little Action) is a primer for how to get your activism on. Not how to participate in someone else’s vision, but how to figure out where you stand on progressive issues and how to take that position out into the community to make social change. The book is full of advice on how to get up on the issues, find the facts in a sea of spin and make sense of it all.

Get Opinionated! covers political types (my favorite being Manic Pixie Dream Girl Liberal Chicks) with biting accuracy and then goes through key issues – environmentalism, LGBTQ equality rights, health care, the war on drugs and reproductive justice – with a break down of what’s what followed by suggestions for how the reader can take action on each issue. The book seeks to helping the reader keep it real and get involved in a profound way.

Chapter One – You Don’t Have to be a Stinky Hippie to be an Environmentalist – breaks down the joys of living green, the limited impact of living green and what individuals can do to kick their environmentalism into gear.

Chapter Two – Read a Book, or at Least a Blog – deals with one of my pet peeves, which is the problem with folks learning politics from just watching television.

Subsequent chapters cover taxes and public wealth, health care and why we should give a shit about the health of others, the war on drugs and it’s impact on politics, reproductive rights and access and how only one side of the abortion debate wants you to get laid, GLBTQ rights and the homosexual agenda, the war on terror and how it’s our newest excuse not to take care of business at home. Get Opinionated! delves into why liberals should become political skeptics and promote science, the red state/blue state divide and the culture war over the separation of church and state. It’s a progressive buffet of the issues currently on the political menu and how individuals can get involved and take action.

Amanda Marcotte blogs at Pandagon, podcasts and writes for RH Reality Check and has written for Salon.com and the Guardian UK. She is a feminist force who has found her voice and, with Get Opinionated!, is out to inspire other progressives to do the same.

I can’t wait to discuss Get Opinionated! with her and all y’all too!