The Urgency of Now: It ain't big but it is clever

Jane Goode reviews The Urgency of Now

This is the bigger version Up to a fifth of the global population - people in coastal zones threatened by rising sea levels and natural disasters - could be homeless by 2050

At first glance “The Urgency of Now” made me cautious, the remit for a 60 page booklet was rather a large one: “A small book about the madness of inequality and poverty: how they're wrecking people's lives and why sorting them out will make things better for us all.” Phew. And yet, for me, someone who is often referred to as 'the converted', it did seem interesting even if to achieve this claim the book would have to be the Mary Poppins bag of campaign literature or entirely inadequate for this stated purpose.

The good news is that it is neither, nor is it solely aimed people like me, the self-indulgent 'converted'. It is much more accurate to describe this booklet as a key. Read in conjunction with the main text “From Poverty, to Power”, or while referring to the website: www.fp2p.org – this tiny little book of questions, discussions and suggestions opens the door onto the challenges facing the world in the twenty-first century in relation to poverty and inequality.

The vibrant lay-out, photos, text, diagrams suggests it has been designed to dip into, to pick up and put down, and be rest assured, you will always want to pick it back up again. Case studies make the theoretical easy to translate into lived experience and mercifully the authors, Duncan Green and Isobel Allen have not left us to drown in a well of statistics.

Ok, if you are a professor in International Development, this is certainly not going to tell you anything new and if you are a billionaire you may have already guessed that you are being asked to make some, not necessarily comfortable, changes but for the rest of us mere mortals it is considered, intelligent, engaging and I would argue, exciting.

Inevitably many situations and ideas are only given a fleeting mention, the product, I guess, of condensing so much into so few a pages. Having said this, the arguments contained within are convincing and detailed, few people I know would posit inequality as a bad thing but few I would say, including myself, have got down to the nuts and bolts of why this is, how inequality manifests itself and how we redress the balance, starting now, which this booklet successfully does.

Finally, the beauty of this text is that it leaves you with more questions than answers, willing you to keep digging, to satisfy your curiosity and I project, take action on the information you find.

In short, it ain't big but it is clever.