Customer Reviews

Linked Arms: A Rural Community Resists Nuclear Waste

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4 star:		(1)
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Through a highly engaging and readable text, we join a mixed group of farmers, tradespeople, and resident academics in rural upstate New York as they are born in the realization that acting together, non-violently, and with sacrificial resolve, they can protect their beloved lands and everyone's futures from ill-thought governmental-industrial dumping of nuclear waste in their midst.
The beauty of the book is the author's letting the people speak for themselves as they each face personal and sometimes professional challenges in the unfolding drama of building effective resistance to bad government policy. Here you read how real folks in a real drama make significant change not only in their own back yards, but through subsequent Supreme Court decisions to their activity, for the nation as a whole.
This is must reading for:
- people anywhere being 'put upon' by greedy corporate or careless government actions,
- students of the efficacy of non-violent civil disobedience in the modern age,
- cynics who may feel there are inseperable bounderies between the "classes" in our society preventing thereby meaningful political action,
- and, in it's final dramatic chapters, lovers of horses.

Read it and enjoy!

This book tells the story of people in a rural Upstate NY county that was slated to receive nuclear waste as mandated by the federal govt. Find out how their movement changed the course of America because they refused to accept that they were "economically and politically powerless". Inspiring and educational.

I have to say that when I was required to buy this book for a NYS history class, I was not planning on reading it. I grew up in the heart of Allegany County and this dump would have, literally, been 5 miles from my house. I was 5 when the proposed dump project was unveiled--yet I don't remember much of this fight. I was so impressed with this book, I did my entire class project on the Allegany County Dump Protests. (I got a 100, too!)

Reading this book was fantastic for me--and will be for anybody interested in how small communities fight big corporations and government--and win. I didn't know that the head of janitorial staff at my college was willing to be arrested to protect this dump-site from nuclear waste. I didn't know that my 3rd grade teacher was a major player in this fight. This inspiring story of small-town people who, according to the big government of NY were too uneducated and few to do anything, were able to stop such a gigantic monstrosity from destroying their health and land.

This is a fairly quick read--and it reads like a conversation with an old friend. Sprinkled with humor and wit, you truly don't know that you're done with the book until you turn the last page--I read it in 2 nights. Inspiring and gripping at the same time, you come to see how each small part that each person played came together in a fight that literally saved lives.