Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
How to rebuild our country so its politics aren't broken and its politicians aren't fixed.
"Neither right nor left but ahead" is the only political course for maverick journalist Sam Smith in this entertaining, myth-busting guide to a new American crossover politics. Witty and profound, opinionated and informative, Smith has important things to say to politically disaffected Americans of all stripes. This primer gives hope that the coughing engines and stripped gears of American democracy can be made to work again if we can recover our can-do spirit and practice a politics of common sense and common decency combined with a search for common ground.
In chapters such as "How to figure out why you need this book a diagnostic test for political deficit disorder," "How to stay alive a poker player's guide to the environment," "How to find things out despite the media and other obstacles," and "How to get along with other Americans living next to 250 million people who aren't quite like you," Smith conjoins hilarity and wisdom, education and provocation, giving us what we need to fix America and have a good time while we're at it.
Synopsis
How to rebuild our country so its politics aren't broken and its politicians aren't fixed.
Publishers Weekly
"We are now in one of those periods in which everything seems weighted against the interests of the ordinary human being," contends Smith, citing a recent poll in which only 2% of U.S. residents responding thought the country was in excellent shape. We basically have two choices, he adds: "One is to do nothing and just let it get worse. The other is to follow in the footsteps of those before us who refused to let this happen and who refused to believe they couldn't beat city hall." In this bracing compendium of fact and myth about how the system isand isn'tworking, Smith (Shadows of Hope: A Freethinker's Guide to Politics in the Time of Clinton) offers hundreds of remedies for the sense that we are powerless to recover ownership of the country. He tackles the monetization of values, the dependence on statisticians and economists (who "not only have trouble with theory but can't add right"), the power of global corporations that only use America as a mail drop, the substitution of busing for residential integration and the media's obfuscation of real information. Among Smith's suggestions: that communities, organizations and even individuals can raise money for their projects by printing their ownperfectly legal if it can't be mistaken for the government kindfor circulation in the local economy; that unemployment ought to be reduced by shortening workweeks instead of downsizing; that education and jobs control population growth more effectively than contraceptives. But these are only a fraction of the suggestions packed into this upbeat and rich exploration of how to refocus the democracy. Author tour. (July)