Dennis Kucinich: What have I been working on? The Division of Light and Power
Email from Dennis Kucinich, former Cleveland, OH city council member, clerk of courts, mayor, Ohio State Senator, U.S. Representative, and two-time presidential candidate:
Dear Friend,
I would like to share with you my personal odyssey in writing The Division of Light and Power, which goes on sale on June 8, 2021.
I began writing the first draft in November of 1979 at journalist Bob Scheer’s and LA Time’s editor Narda Zacchino’s house in Berkeley, California. I discovered I was too close to the searing experiences described in the book. I could not tell the story, much as I tried. It was man against white space and white space won, my thoughts of a book, projections of futility against a torn screen.
The page was blank, in some ways that is the way my life felt. I set aside the project. I wrote drafts in 1981, 1984, and 1993. Not satisfied, I put the writing aside again during service in the Ohio Senate and US Congress. When I left Congress in 2013, I focused on the book, wrote a few more drafts. Then, three years ago, in 2018, I began again, and, finally, was able to produce the first final draft.
The book’s subtitle could well be “My Life in Boxes.” I carried nearly 100 boxes of the documentation and notes around with me for 50 years, carting them from place to place, cardboard extensions of myself, of unrealized articulations, parked in basements, garages, and cold storage lockers. The swirling fragments of the story were an etheric version of Marley’s chains, an emotional and spiritual burden from the ghost of Christmases past, apparitions rattling around in the attic of my brain, insisting upon being brought to form.
Finally, the book is real. I have a printer’s galley to prove it. The book will go on sale on June the 8th, 2021. Here are some links:
AMAZON: https://amzn.to/2SDlqb9
BARNES & NOBLE: https://bit.ly/3om4emw
TARGET: https://bit.ly/33PaNEq
I ask that you preorder the book, and, once you read it, if you like it, tell your friends. Some of you may have media contacts to share word of the book. Please direct them to Johanna@jrbcomm.com. Please pass the word and encourage others to read The Division of Light and Power and learn we can reclaim government for the people.
With your help, The Division of Light and Power will create a call to action, on utilities, on local governance and on the urgency of each one of us taking a stand. It is also a call to action for courage, for never giving up and never giving in.
With gratitude for your support,
Dennis
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How “The People’s Mayor” Saved Public Power
Long before he was a member of Congress or a presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich found himself embroiled in a fight to protect public utilities in Cleveland from privatization.
A "Deconstructed" podcast, published by The Intercept.
The Intercept's D.C. Bureau Chief since May, 2017, Ryan Grim, interviews Dennis Kucinich.
Grim was also the reporter of record -- at Huffington Post -- on the nuclear power industry lobby-orchestrated take down of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Greg Jaczko, in the 2011-2012 timeframe. Grim also emceed the D.C. book launch event for Jaczko's own 2019 book, Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator.
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In Sept. 2012, at a Capitol Hill event, Kucinich praised Beyond Nuclear's watchdogging work at Davis-Besse in Ohio.
From 2010 to 2016, Beyond Nuclear co-led -- albeit unsuccessful -- coalition efforts to force the dangerously age-degraded reactor's permanent shutdown, in various, multiple NRC licensing proceeding interventions.