Bøger af Susan Jacoby

In Never Say Die, Susan Jacoby delivers a brave, impassioned, and exceptionally important wake-up call to Americans who have long been deluded by the dangerous myth that a radically new old age awaits the huge baby boom generation. Combining historical, social, and economic analysis with personal experiences of love and loss, Jacoby unmasks the fallacies promoted by twenty-first-century hucksters of longevity, and reveals the hazards of the magical thinking that prevents us from facing the genuine battles of growing old. Never Say Die speaks to Americans, whatever their age, who draw courage and hope from facing reality instead of embracing platitudes and delusions, and who want to grow old with dignity and purpose. It is a life-affirming and powerful message that has never been more relevant.

"Jacoby accomplishes her task with clarity, thoroughness, and an engaging passion." -Los Angeles Times Book Review At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby traces more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected achievements of secularists who, allied with tolerant believers, have led the battle for reform in the past and today.Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, and the once-famous Robert Green Ingersoll, Freethinkers restores to history the passionate humanists who struggled against those who would undermine the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system.

A best-selling author and passionate baseball fan takes a tough-minded look at America's most traditional game in our twenty-first-century culture of digital distraction

A biography that restores America's foremost nineteenth-century champion of reason and secularism to our still contested twenty-first-century public square

Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars havelabored to uncover the facts behind Chamberss shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage.In this highly original work,Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the left and the right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present postCold War era. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the postWorld War II eraand then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties.