Many of you know John Wackman, an active member of Kingston Transition, and you may have heard about the new book Repair Revolution, which he coauthored. John brought Repair Cafes to the Hudson Valley where Kingston Transition sponsored the first one in Kingston in 2015. It is now coordinated by Melissa Iachetta in partnership with Bike-Friendly Kingston and the Kingston Y's Bike-It! program.

John and his co-author, Elizabeth Knight, set out to write a substantial book about the culture of repair: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture. The book casts a much wider net than simply fixing our stuff--it is about the mindset of thrift, agency and zero waste. It is about activist artists who have taken up repair as their manifesto. It is about the right to repair, the circular economy and rebuilding the repair economy. Deeply researched, it ultimately presents a strategy for building resilient communities.

It includes the story of the Transition Town movement--and how Repair Cafes have been taken on as initiatives in dozens of Transition Towns in the US. It includes stories of environmental repair--the battle for the Hudson River and the Clearwater. Social repair and reparations (the Pine Street African Burial Ground) are part of the story: These examples are regional, but the book is national and international in scope, introducing the reader to all of the leaders of the global repair movement.