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  When Freedom Speaks - The...

  Lynn Greenky

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  This book makes first amendment issues immediate and contemporary. When Freedom Speaks chronicles the stories behind our First Amendment right to speak our minds. Lynn Levine Greenky's background as a lawyer, rhetorician, and teacher gives her a unique perspective on the protection we have from laws that abridge our right to the freedom of speech. Rhetoricians focus on language and how it influences perception and moves people to action. Powerfully employing that rhetorical approach, this book explores concepts related to free speech as moral narratives that proscribe the boundaries of our constitutionally protected right. Using the characters and drama embedded in legal cases that elucidate First Amendment principles, When Freedom Speaks makes the concepts easier to understand and clearly applicable to our lives. With a wide range of examples and accessible language, this book is the perfect overview of the First Amendment.

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  Turning Points - The Role of the...

  Ambassador Thomas J. Corcoran,...

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  Details how the US State Department attempted, and failed, to save South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression and the powerful domestic political influences that ultimately led to America's defeat.Ten years after the end of the American involvement in the Vietnam War, a career Foreign Service officer, Thomas J. Corcoran, set down in writing his thoughts on the history of US State Department policy during America's involvement with South Vietnam. Like many Americans of his generation, he was perplexed by the failure of America to achieve its goals in South Vietnam. As an ambassador and with over thirty years of diplomatic experience—beginning in 1948 when he was assigned to Hanoi and involving other postings in Southeast Asia—he brought to his analysis a long and rich personal experience with events in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.The result is a thoughtful, objective, and well-researched study that chronicles the key policy decisions made by the US State Department throughout the entire period from 1945 to 1975; decisions that ultimately led to the first war lost by the United States. In his extensive study, Corcoran does an excellent job of exposing many of the myths and falsehoods found in orthodox histories of US involvement in Vietnam.

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  Chasing Utopia - The Future of...

  David Leach

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  A mix of memoir and history offering “a nuanced, unflinching look at the Israeli dream of the kibbutz and its demise . . . darkly comic . . . utterly engrossing” (Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving).   The word “Israel” today sparks images of walls and rockets and a bloody conflict without end. Yet for decades, the symbol of the Jewish State was the noble pioneer making the desert bloom: the legendary kibbutznik. So whatever happened to the dream of founding a socialist utopia in the land called Palestine? In this book David Leach revisits his raucous memories of life as a kibbutz volunteer and returns to meet a new generation of Jewish and Arab citizens struggling to forge a better future together. Crisscrossing the nation, he chronicles the controversial decline of the kibbutz movement and witnesses a renaissance of its original vision in unexpected corners of the Promised Land. Chasing Utopia is an entertaining, enlightening portrait of a divided nation where hope persists against the odds. “An informative history . . . laced with interviews with Jewish and Palestinian activists.” —Publishers Weekly    “Upon his return to Israel twenty years later, now a middle-aged father with children, Leach found enormous changes—not only to [Kibbutz] Shamir, which had embraced privatization in the mid-2000s and listed its Optical Industry on NASDAQ, but the whole kibbutz system. . . . Leach’s report is both affectingly personal, delving into many intimate stories of visionaries, and a sound historical study.” —Kirkus Reviews   “Exceptionally well-researched and beautifully written . . . readers wondering about the allure and challenges of utopian communities will find a probing examination that takes them to lesser-known corners of Israel and the West Bank.” ―Jessamyn Hope, author of Safekeeping   “Leach maintains a neutral stance when discussing the conflict that is tearing Israel apart, and writes with great empathy for all sides . . . He is at times funny and self-effacing, but he is also keen-eyed and generous in his observations . . . a stellar achievement.” ―Quill & Quire

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  Democracy in America

  Alexis de Tocqueville, Harvey C....

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  Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country’s equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone. 
    
  When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop’s new translation of Democracy in America—only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840—was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville’s classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville’s language, with the expressed goal “to convey Tocqueville’s thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today.” The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship.

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  The Birth of Anarchism - 1849-1887

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail...

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  Mankind can rule itself without the force of top-down authority, and freedom is more than just choosing how to meet the needs and demands of capital. Inequality is structural and intentional, not inevitable and necessary.  
  It does not have to be this way. In solidarity, we are better. 
  Think for yourself, and question authority. 
  This is the essence of anarchism, which has a bad name and reputation because it attacks the necessity of centralised power and authority. The media archetype is Tyler Durden, filled with violence and nihilism – yet anarchism is the most positive of political philosophies, one that Jesus and Buddha both preached, stating that empathy and a rejection of authority were key to human flourishing. Neither would disagree with most early anarchists. 
  Proudhon, whose “property is robbery” is perhaps the most well-known anarchist slogan, lays out the conceptual foundation for key anarchist ideas. He argues that usury (charging interest) is a fundamental harm to society, that there is enough for everyone if we simply take other values to be higher than capital gain, that mutualism is inevitable, and that all governments and ideologies make the same mistake, in trying to change society from the top. Positive change must arise from the great masses of humanity, not from their rulers. 
  Bakunin's speeches are about solidarity arising from the masses, and the ground for a global reconfiguration. 
  Louis Lingg was convicted to death with six others, for being one of the ‘Chicago Anarchists’. They were executed to make a political point, based on corrupted evidence and perjury. His statement is one of contempt for the powers that be, and his belief that mankind should be free and should fight until it is. 
  We end with Kropotkin, who firmly believed in decentralized society. He believed that the greatest strength of mankind lies in the masses, not their rulers, and exhorts us to “Act for Yourselves”.

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  Philosophy Between the Lines -...

  Arthur M. Melzer

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  “Shines a floodlight on a topic that has been cloaked in obscurity . . . a landmark work in both intellectual history and political theory” (The Wall Street Journal).   Philosophical esotericism—the practice of communicating one’s unorthodox thoughts “between the lines”—was a common practice until the end of the eighteenth century. Despite its long and well-documented history, however, esotericism is often dismissed today as a rare occurrence. But by ignoring esotericism, we risk cutting ourselves off from a full understanding of Western philosophical thought.   Walking readers through both an ancient (Plato) and a modern (Machiavelli) esoteric work, Arthur M. Melzer explains what esotericism is—and is not. It relies not on secret codes, but simply on a more intensive use of familiar rhetorical techniques like metaphor, irony, and insinuation. Melzer explores the various motives that led thinkers in different times and places to engage in this strange practice, while also exploring the motives that lead more recent thinkers not only to dislike and avoid this practice but to deny its very existence. In the book’s final section, “A Beginner’s Guide to Esoteric Reading,” Melzer turns to how we might once again cultivate the long-forgotten art of reading esoteric works.   The first comprehensive, book-length study of the history and theoretical basis of philosophical esotericism, Philosophy Between the Lines is “a treasure-house of insight and learning. It is that rare thing: an eye-opening book . . . By making the world before Enlightenment appear as strange as it truly was, [Melzer] makes our world stranger than we think it is” (George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University).   “Brilliant, pellucid, and meticulously researched.” —City Journal

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