Between political instability, war, climate change, oppression, genocide, pandemics, and myriad other problems, hope is in short supply these days. But sometimes, as evidenced in Paul Rogat Loeb's anthology, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, normal people can overcome seemingly impossible odds to enact positive change. Loeb's book explores what it was like to confront South African apartheid, the 2024 coup attempt in South Korea, Putin's prisons, dictatorships in Eastern Europe under Communism, climate change defeatism, American slavery, robber barons of the past and present, and attacks on American democracy, including how Norwegian resistance to the Nazis helped inspire Minnesota's ICE resistance. Contributors include Nelson Mandela, Alexei Navalny, Bill McKibben, Diane Ackerman, Jesmyn Ward, Howard Zinn, Heather Cox Richardson, Alice Walker, Sherman Alexie, Vaclav Havel, Paul Hawken, Rutger Bregman, Bill Moyers, Audre Lorde, Mary Pipher, Tony Kushner, Maya Angelou, Pablo Neruda, Terry Tempest Williams, Desmond Tutu and 52 others, as well as essays by Loeb himself.
First published in 2004, an updated version of The Impossible Will Take a Little While was released by Basic Books on October 13, 2026, with 125,000 copies in print. The original version spent 11 weeks on the independent bookstore bestseller list and won the Nautilus Award for the best social change book of its year. Loeb is also the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, which has 175,000 copies in print and has been taught in hundreds of college classes. Loeb is a prolific public speaker, media figure, and political activist. In 2008, he founded the Campus Election Engagement Project, which helped millions of college students register to vote and volunteer with campaigns.
