Sept. 25, 2000 — Local Heroes Changing America, edited by Tom Rankin and the staff of Indivisible, a collaborative project of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, presents a collection of photographs and narratives honoring the grassroots initiatives of 12 diverse American communities (among them, the Southwest Youth Collaborative in Chicago and the Handmade in America Small Town Revitalization Project in western North Carolina). As journalist Ray Suarez recognizes in his foreword, although the people and their communities may look unchanged, the confidence they exude as a result of their efforts is obvious even to the most casual observer. CD included; 240 color and b&w photos. (Norton, $29.95 288p ISBN 0-393-05028-9; Oct.)

"Affirmative Action"
By Charles Hix

In his autobiography, Will Rogers dryly opined, "This thing about being a hero, about the main thing to do is to know when to die. Prolonged life has ruined more men than it ever made." No such cynicism is evidenced in two meticulously produced testimonials to humankind's higher nature. Local Heroes Changing America (Norton, Nov.) and Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World (Crown, Sept.). The former is edited by Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; the focus in text and pictures is grassroots activism in the U.S. The second title is by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, (daughter of Bobby Kennedy and wife of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo), with stunning b&w portraits by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Eddie Adams. Here the 50 featured human rights defenders are a mix of the famous (the Dalai Lama, Elie Wiesel, Vaclav Havel) and the unsung, whose crusades against such abuses as child prostitution and religious persecution are presented as first-person narratives. The protagonists in Local Heroes Changing America are mainly "ordinary" people— midwives, crisis-management counselors, unpaid volunteers—from a dozen communities where neighbors joined together to spearhead successful local initiatives on issues from housing and race relations to crime prevention and health care.