From Cairo to cyberspace, from Main Street to Wall Street, today's social movements have a creative new edge that’s blurring the boundaries between artist and activist, hacker and dreamer. But the principles that make for successful creative action rarely get hashed out or written down.Until now.

Beautiful Trouble brings together ten grassroots groups and dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world to distill their best practices into a toolbox for creative action. Among the groups included are Agit-Pop/The Other 98%, The Yes Men/Yes Labs, Code Pink, SmartMeme, The Ruckus Society, Beyond the Choir, The Center for Artistic Activism, Waging Nonviolence, Alliance of Community Trainers and Nonviolence International.

Let me start this review by saying that I am not planning on starting a violent revolution. You can call off the black helicopters.

This book is split into multiple parts, talking about Tactics, Principles, Theories and Case Studies of activism, starting as early as the '50s and ending as recently as 2010. So, there is a large timespan and a large span of different types of activism that this book is dealing with.

This book is not so much a comprehensive manual (each of the 2-3 page chapters could probably expanded into its own book) and more of an overview, with references if you are interested in further information. It features some very interesting concepts, and I'd love to see some of these ideas in modern protests.

The book deals almost exclusively with nonviolent techniques, which I like a lot (I dislike violence, no matter how justified you may feel about it in the situation).

If you are an aspiring activist (or just interested in the concepts behind activism), definitely give this book a read. I picked it up for $1 when it was on sale, but, in retrospect, it's probably worth paying full price for it. The eBook version is somewhat harder to read than the pdf (or, probably, the paper version), but it's still possible.

So, yeah, if you are interested, give this book a try. ( )