Seattle freelance art critic and author Susan Noyes Platt does not write "negative." She highlights what's going right instead of critiquing what's going wrong, and, she admits, "I guess it's 'cause I'm chicken." But in important ways she's also not chicken at all.

For instance, you might recognize her from your morning commute: Every Friday from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. at 23rd and Union, she takes part in an anti-war demonstration. Every week. It's been going for years. She waves and wakes people up, smiling.

She also writes art books that are overtly about politics—a stance that has the potential to make all sides squirm. She's heard the arguments that political art is preachy and heavy-handed, or that politics and aesthetics are separate, or that if you want to make a real difference, well, art isn't the best way, anyway. But she's also seen how easily those arguments are adopted by those who want to maintain the status quo, how allergic art power brokers can be to content, and how art and artists can make observable differences.

So she's written the book, Art and Politics Now: Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis, and she'll be reading from it and speaking at Elliott Bay Book Company on Monday. The book focuses mainly on art made in the first decade of the 21st century—that conflicted Bush-dominated, then Obaminated time—and includes several nationally underappreciated Seattle artists. It's a follow-up to her book Art and Politics in the 1930s, published in 1999 also by Midmarch Arts Press and praised by luminary art theorist Lucy Lippard, which provided a counterpoint to the usual avant-garde parade of modernism (I haven't read it yet).

As an activist, Platt is golden. She knows her stuff, she travels, and she is passionate but Zen. As an author, her strength is that she is not preachy, and she does not limit herself to any single style or type of art, any dogma of her own. Art and Politics Now begins with protest-march puppets, moves to abstract painting, and ends with a landscape installation by the architect Maya Lin, stopping along the way at pretty much every known medium and approach. What makes each of these artists worth including? They are all devoted to social engagement, and not just in the short term; they respond to political concerns for years on end.

The writing can feel plodding, and Platt champions some artists I just don't think are terribly interesting. (She also introduces artists who are doing works similar to other, well-known, artists whose work she never mentions: Omer Fast, Jeremy Deller, An-My Le, and Cao Fei, to name a few.) My biggest critique of the book has to do with the complexities that it doesn't look into, of which there are some right in her backyard: Seattle Art Museum's Gwen Knight and Jacob Lawrence Gallery as a potential site for explorations of artists from across the African diaspora; the globalized/localized presence of Chris Jordan's eco-heroic megaphotographs; the unprecedented appearance of ritual material in SAM's recent Salish show; art as torture, as seen in Meiro Koizumi's works in Seattle and Bellevue in 2009.

But Platt's reach is broad—she's very good at contrasting two very different Istanbul biennials, for instance, and also at describing what artists such as Abu Ghraib documentarian/artist Daniel Heyman are up to—and no book on politics and art in the last ten years could possibly be comprehensive. Plus, her low-conflict approach feels in keeping with her ideals of pacifism. If she leaves certain problems or examples unexplored, she does provide other examples for how you might approach them if you wanted to go further.

Above all, her work is good. As in, the opposite of evil. In art and academia, we've been taught that this doesn't matter, that ethics is just another in a world of debatable details. And it's not.

It's no surprise that Platt, who grew up in New York City, was driven to the street by the ivory tower. She has a Ph.D in art history and was a tenured professor at the University of North Texas in Denton.

"But what made me really out-in-the street political was being in academia, witnessing these convoluted melodramas that go on within these petty little programs," she said in a phone interview. "I took all that fury with this stuff and just went right into political action." Now, in addition to working with Radical Women in Columbia City, she writes and raises money for the terrific, Central-District-based James and Janie Washington Foundation.

May we all remember what's important as well as Platt does. Her blog is here.