Here at Artwala Road we’re always looking for the good news and here’s something good. GlobalValues 101, published by the socially conscious Beacon Press, is a book we all ought to read to stoke the fire of our own best instincts.

In the late nineties students at Harvard protested in support of a living wage for custodial help at the university. Inspired by their success Professor Brian Palmer and teaching fellow Kate Holbrook designed a course to examine the ways we might more conscientiously respond to the gross differences in our inherited fates. The course launched the day after our own fate changed in 2001. They invited teachers, politicians, economists, historians, ministers, nuns, musicians, journalists, doctors, all working for a better, more equitable world, to come to this class and answer questions prepared and delivered by students. This book is a record of some of these sessions brilliantly edited by Holbrook and two former students who became teaching fellows in the class—Ann S. Kim and Anna Portnoy.

Groomer of custodians of the status quo that Harvard can be, many who came to speak came from within the institution itself. Howard Zinn, an historian who looks at history from the perspective of the people rather than the power brokers; Juliet Schor, an economist who has focused attention on the particularly American trend of overwork and what that means to the less-advantaged amongst us; Paul Farmer, the medical doctor who fights AIDS in one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, Haiti; and Harvey Cox, the theologian who discusses the way we try to make the market God. Others come from outside the university. Amy Goodman is a journalist who believes it is her role to go ‘where the silence is and say something.’ Naomi Klein is another journalist, a critic of corporate power. What they all have to say is let’s take a closer, harder look so that we can change things to the benefit of those who are suppressed, or left out, or stricken with the worst sorts of disadvantage—poverty, poor health, the imprisonment of spirit.

There were other guests in the course—a cafeteria worker who spoke of the love she feels for those she serves; a Buddhist nun from Tibet who talked of how difficult it was for her to lift her voice up until she began to teach her fellow nuns to sing. The book is full of stories of courage where people acted on behalf of others. I can’t think of a more apt time to read this book than now when even the planet is crying.

Brian Palmer, who made this class one of the most popular in Harvard’s history, is now gracing Sweden with his wit, wisdom and energy, doubtless gleaning from that more equitable society lessons that can be brought home in one way or another. Gone though he is from these shores, we have a book that continues to incite us to radical insight and better action. It makes you believe we’re capable of the justice we dream of. Thank you Brian, Kate, Ann and Anna. And Beacon Press. And Harvard too.