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The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Inspire and Define Our Nation Review

The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Inspire and Define Our Nation Feature

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The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Inspire and Define Our Nation Overview

"The Thirteen American Arguments is a thought-provoking, engaging study of the great American debate, and a highly worthwhile read."�RealClearPolitics.com

�Insightful and enjoyable . . . . In The Thirteen American Arguments, Howard Fineman lifts readers above the fog of modern politics . . . and offers a unique vantage point from which to see that the debates that shape American politics are timeless and profound.� --The Washingtonian

Howard Fineman is one of our best-known and most trusted political journalists. Mixing vivid scenes and figures from the campaign trail with forays into four hundred years of American history, Fineman shows that every debate, from our nation�s founding to the present day, is rooted in one of thirteen arguments that�thankfully�defy resolution. It is the very process of never-ending argument, Fineman explains, that defines us, inspires us, and keeps us free. At a time when most public disagreement seems shrill and meaningless, Fineman makes a cogent case for nurturing the real American dialogue.

Shouting is not arguing, Fineman notes, but often hot-button topics, media �cross-fires,� and blogs reflect the deepest currents in American life. In an enlightening book that cuts through the din and makes sense of the headlines, Fineman captures the essential issues that have always compelled healthy and heated debate�and must continue to do so in order for us to prosper in the twenty-first century. The Thirteen American Arguments run the gamut, from issues of individual identity to our country�s role in the world, including:

� Who is a Person? The Declaration of Independence says �everyone,� but it took a Civil War and the Civil Rights and other movements to make that a reality. Presently, what about human embryos and �unlawful enemy combatants?�
� Who is an American? Only a nation of immigrants could argue so much about who should become one. There is currently added urgency when terrorists are at large in the world and twelve million �undocumented� aliens are in the country.
� The Role of Faith. No country is more legally secular yet more avowedly prayerful. From Thomas Jefferson to Terri Schiavo, we can never quite decide where God fits in government.
� Presidential Power. In a democracy, leadership is all the more difficult � and, paradoxically, all the more essential. From George Washington to George W. Bush, we have always asked: How much power should a president have?
� America in the World. Uniquely, we perpetually ask ourselves whether we have a moral obligation to change the world � or, alternatively, whether we must try to change it to survive in it.

Whether it�s the environment, international trade, interpreting law, Congress vs. the president, or reformers vs. elites, these are the issues that galvanized the Founding Fathers and should still inspire our leaders, thinkers, and citizens. If we cease to argue about these things, we cease to be. �Argument is strength, not weakness,� says Fineman. �As long as we argue, there is hope, and as long as there is hope, we will argue.�

Praise for The Thirteen American Arguments
�A spectacular feat, a profound book about America that moves with ease from history to recent events. A talented storyteller, Howard Fineman provides a human face to each of the core political arguments that have alternately separated, strengthened, and sustained us from our founding to the present day.�
�Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals

�With a marvelous command of the past and a keen grasp of the present, Howard Fineman expertly details one of the great truths about our country: that we are a nation built on arguments, and our capacity to summon what Lincoln called �the better angels of our nature� lies in undertaking those debates with civility and mutual respect. Few people understand politics as well as Fineman does, and this work is an indispensable guide not only to the battles of the moment, but to the wars that will go on long after this news cycle is long forgotten.�
�Jon Meacham, author of Franklin and Winston

�In an impressively thought-provoking original approach, Fineman revisits the great defining arguments that will deepen your understanding of America.�
�Newt Gingrich, author of Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works

�Howard Fineman proves that few things are as compelling as a well-argued debate. This book offers a thought-provoking way to look at America, its history, and our evolving public discourse.�
�Arianna Huffington, author of Right Is Wrong

�A perfect antidote to the old horse-race political journalism�a timely (and timeless) reminder of what�s really at stake in the race for the presidency.�
�Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

�Howard Fineman guides the reader through the controversies that have haunted this nation since its inception. In the process he creates a fresh context for making sense of the 2008 campaign. Both scholars and students of politics can learn much from this book.�
�Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-author of unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation

�A stimulating book that should be read by anyone who cares about the idea and arguments that made this country great, and which are critical to our future direction.�
�David Boies, author of Courting Justice

"America is �The Arguing Country, born in, and born to, debate,� claims veteran journalist Fineman in this
brisk look at 13 debates that have driven (and riven) the nation from its inception, and continue to do so
today. Arising from fundamental questions like �Who is a person?� or �What can we know and say?� or
�What does it mean to pursue a more perfect union?� these 13 debates are perennial, undergirding each of
the nation�s political controversies, and they are constitutive, defining nothing less than America�s national identity. If American political discourse frequently runs hot, it is because Americans are as passionate
about these fundamental questions as they are different in their answers. Knowing that Fineman is an
occasional guest on MSNBC�s Hardball, it is perhaps tempting to read this book as a particularly eloquent
and historically informed apologia for the fiery point-counterpoint duels often seen on cable news
channels. Yet Fineman openly acknowledges that the media sometimes hinders open debate, and it would
be more accurate to describe Fineman�s work as itself an argument, urging perspective and optimism amid today�s overheated debates."�Booklist


From the Hardcover edition.

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The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat Review

The Last Stand of Fox Company: A True Story of U.S. Marines in Combat Overview

From the bestselling authors of Halsey's Typhoon comes the true story of a Marine company's heroic last stand during America's "Forgotten War."

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Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization Review

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization Overview

Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy---a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II.

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization Specifications

Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy -- a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II.

Human Smoke delivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources -- including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries -- the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and examine the gradual, horrifying advance toward overt global war and Holocaust.

Praised by critics and readers alike for his exquisitely observant eye and deft, inimitable prose, Baker has assembled a narrative within Human Smoke that unfolds gracefully, tragically, and persuasively. This is an unforgettable book that makes a profound impact on our perceptions of historical events and mourns the unthinkable loss humanity has borne at its own hand.

Questions for Nicholson Baker

Amazon.com: This is obviously a big departure for you, in both style and subject. How did the project come about, and how did it find this form?

Baker: I was writing a different book, on a smaller historical subject, when I stopped and asked: Do I understand World War Two? And of course I didn't. Also I'd been reading newspapers from the thirties and forties, and I knew that there were startling things in them.

In earlier books, I've looked closely at moments to see why they matter, and I've tried to rescue things, people, ideas from overfamiliarity. So in a way a book like this--which moves a loupe over some incidents along the way to a much-chronicled war--was a natural topic.

But yes, the style is a departure: it's very simple here out of respect for the hellishness of the story that I'm trying to assemble, piece by piece.

Amazon.com: Why World War Two in particular?

Baker: Politicians constantly fondle a small, clean, paperweight version of this war, as if it provides them with moral clarity. We know that it was the most destructive five year period in history. It was destructive of human lives, and also of shelter, sleep, warmth, gentleness, mercy, political refuge, rational discussion, legal process, civil tradition, and public truth. Millions of people were gassed, shot, starved, and worked to death by a paranoid fanatic. The war's victims felt as if they'd come to the end of civilization.

But then we also say that because it turned out so badly, it was the one just, necessary war. We acknowledge that it was the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity--and yet it was "the good war." The Greatest Generation fought it, and a generation of people was wiped out.

If we don't try to understand this one war better--understand it not in the sense of coming up with elaborate mechanistic theories of causation, but understand it in the humbler sense of feeling our way through its enormity--then cartoon versions of what happened will continue to distort debates about the merits of all future wars.

Amazon.com: You largely kept your own opinions out of the text, except for the choices you made in what to include and a few editorial comments here and there, as well as your short Afterword at the end. It makes for a real tension between the neutral tone and the sense, at least on the part of this reader, that there are some passionate opinions behind it. What authorial role did you want to establish?

Baker: I found that my own cries of grief, amazement, or outrage--or of admiration at some quiet heroism--took away from the chaos of individual decisions that move events forward.

It helps sometimes to look at an action--compassionate, murderous, confessional, obfuscatory--out of context: as something that somebody did one day. The one-day-ness of history is often lost in traditional histories, because paragraphs and sections are organized by theme: attack, counterattack, argument, counterargument. That's a reasonable way to proceed, but I rejected it here for several reasons. First, because it fails to convey the hugeness and confusion of the time as it was experienced by people who lived through it. And, second, because I wanted the reader to have to form, and then jettison, and then re-form, explanations and mini-narratives along the way--as I did, and as did a newspaper reader in, say, New York City in September, 1941.

I think the pared-down, episodic style allowed me to offer some moments of truth that I wouldn't have been able to offer had I had uppermost in my mind the necessity of making transitions and smoothing out inconsistencies and sounding like me. I offer no organized argument: I want above all to fill the readers mind with an anguished sense of what happened.

Amazon.com: I was telling someone about your book and how it failed to convince me of what I took to be its thesis, and his response was, "Wow, you really made me want to read it." And that's my response too: if your point was to convince me that we shouldn't have fought World War II, then the book didn't work, but I'm still very glad I read it. But maybe that wasn't your point at all.

Baker: I'm really pleased that you responded that way. I didn't want to convince, but only to add enriching complication. Long ago I wrote an essay called "Changes of Mind" in which I tried to talk about how gradual and complicated a shift of conviction can be. I left overt opinionizing out of this book so that a reader can draw his or her own conclusions, folding in other knowledge.

There are many books about the war that I value highly even though I don't agree with the world-outlook of the people who wrote them. To take a major example: Churchill's own memoir-history is completely fascinating and revealing--and a great pleasure to read--although I happen to think that Churchill was himself a bad war leader.

There's no point in trying to use a book to replace one simple set of beliefs about World War Two with another simple set of beliefs. The war years are alive with contradictions and puzzles and shake-your-head-in-wonder moments. You're going to look at it in different ways on different days because you're going to have different moments uppermost in your mind.

On the other hand, I don't want to hide what I think. Here's what I am, more or less: I'm a non-religious pacifist who is sympathetic to Quaker notions of nonviolent resistance and of refuge and aid for those who need help. I find appealing what Christopher Isherwood called "the plain moral stand against killing." I don't expect people to look at things this way, necessarily--after all, it took me a while to get there myself. But I do hope that my book will offer some thought-provocations that anyone, of any ideological persuasion, will want to mull over.

Amazon.com: It's hard to believe there's something new to say about what may be the most written-about event in human history. What did you feel about approaching such a well-chronicled subject? What were you most surprised to find? What responses have you gotten from historians and other readers?

Baker: There were many surprises. For instance, I didn't expect Herbert Hoover, who argued for the lifting of the British blockade in order to get food to Jews in Polish ghettoes and French concentration camps, to be a voice of reason and compassion. I didn't know that German propagandists used the phrase "iron curtain" before Churchill did. I didn't know that in 1940 the Royal Air Force tried to set fire to the forests of Germany. I didn't know how interested the United States government was in arming China. I didn't know how public was Japan's unhappiness with the American oil embargo. I didn't know that many of the people who worked hardest to help Jews escape Hitler were pacifists, not interventionists.

I've had interesting reactions from historians, who seem to understand (for the most part) that I'm not trying to write a comprehensive history of the beginnings of the war. I've had some very good reviews and some very bad ones. The bad ones seem to follow the teeter-totter school: that if a dictator and the nation he controls is evil, then the leader of the nation who opposes the evil dictator must be good. Life isn't that way, of course. There is in fact no "moral equivalence" created by examining coterminous violent and repulsive acts. The notion of moral equivalence is a mistake, because it undermines our notions of personal responsibility and law. Each act of killing is its own act, not something to be heaped like produce on a balancing scale. One person, as Roosevelt said, must not be punished for the deed of another--though he didn't follow his own precept.

Gandhi comes up sometimes. It was said in a review that I "adore" Gandhi. That's not quite right. Gandhi is in many ways an admirable and perceptive man. He spoke gently even while thousands of his supporters were in jail and his country was being bombed by an occupying power. But the years told on him, and he sometimes came to sound, as Nehru once observed in a memoir, cold--indifferent to suffering. He is one voice, and a voice worth listening to.

My real heroes, though, are people like Victor Klemperer, who responded to Hitlerian terror not with counterviolence, but with beautiful nonresistance: by writing a masterpiece of a diary. He and Romanian diarist Mihael Sebastian have the last word for that reason. And I've dedicated the book to British and American pacifists--I want this book to rescue the memory of their loving, troubled efforts to help.

The most interesting and helpful set of responses to the book so far has been at www.edrants.com, where a group of participants discussed Human Smoke for a week, adding all kinds of thoughts, analogies, comparisons, and criticisms. I've never been through anything like it before, and I'm the better for it.

Amazon.com: Your recent celebration of Wikipedia in the New York Review of Books has gotten a lot of attention (deservedly so). Did the style and philosophy of Wikipedia influence the way you wrote Human Smoke? Have you made any Wikipedia updates based on what you found in your research.

Baker: I used Wikipedia during the writing of the book, especially to check facts about subtypes of airplanes and ships--e.g., the Bristol Beaufighter I cited in the first paragraph of the review. Wikipedia is amazingly strong and precise on military hardware. (And on when a British Lord became a Viscount, and on a million other things.) But I've been writing movies, and the model I often had in my mind while working on Human Smoke was the movie documentary--in which short scenes and clips follow each other with a minimum of narration.

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The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal Review

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Check Out Majestie: The King Behind the King James Bible for $12.26

Majestie: The King Behind the King James Bible Review

Majestie: The King Behind the King James Bible Overview

A biography of James Stuart is a study in paradox, one that entertains as much as it informs. James I waddles through history, sidewise and crablike. Intellectually astute, he can dazzle and charm with the polish of his rhetoric one minute, and speak with the vulgarity of a tavern bawd the next. James is an amusing mix of bombast and majesty, of sparkle and grime, of smut and brilliance, of visionary headship and foolishness. And only he, this all-too-human king, our flawed James, could have given us the great book he did. Early in his reign, James fashioned himself as the �new Solomon,� the pacifist prince entering the �the land of promise,� that is, the England inherited from his cousin Elizabeth. But the milk and honey he expected was a mirage. Still, in many respects he flirts with greatness. He is the first king of a united, or �Great Britain.� For all his foibles, all his bungling, James possesses an evolved sense of majesty, a type of faith in majesty itself, and wants nothing more than for his new Bible to reflect this majesty, to gild and elevate the reign, to be the great medicine that might heal the realm.

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Check Out Personal History for $18.00

Personal History Review

Personal History Overview

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

An extraordinarily frank, honest, and generous book by one of America's most famous and admired women, Personal History is, as its title suggests, a book composed of both personal memoir and history.

It is the story of Graham's parents: the multimillionaire father who left private business and government service to buy and restore the down-and-out Washington Post, and the formidable, self-absorbed mother who was more interested in her political and charity work, and her passionate friendships with men like Thomas Mann and Adlai Stevenson, than in her children.

It is the story of how The Washington Post struggled to succeed -- a fascinating and instructive business history as told from the inside (the paper has been run by Graham herself, her father, her husband, and now her son).

It is the story of Phil Graham -- Kay's brilliant, charismatic husband (he clerked for two Supreme Court justices) -- whose plunge into manic-depression, betrayal, and eventual suicide is movingly and charitably recounted.

Best of all, it is the story of Kay Graham herself. She was brought up in a family of great wealth, yet she learned and understood nothing about money. She is half-Jewish, yet -- incredibly -- remained unaware of it for many years.She describes herself as having been naive and awkward, yet intelligent and energetic. She married a man she worshipped, and he fascinated and educated her, and then, in his illness, turned from her and abused her. This destruction of her confidence and happiness is a drama in itself, followed by the even more intense drama of her new life as the head of a great newspaper and a great company, a famous (and even feared) woman in her own right. Hers is a life that came into its own with a vengeance -- a success story on every level.

Graham's book is populated with a cast of fascinating characters, from fifty years of presidents (and their wives), to Steichen, Brancusi, Felix Frankfurter, Warren Buffett (her great advisor and protector), Robert McNamara, George Schultz (her regular tennis partner), and, of course, the great names from the Post: Woodward, Bernstein, and Graham's editorpartner, Ben Bradlee. She writes of them, and of the most dramatic moments of her stewardship of the Post (including the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressmen's strike), with acuity, humor, and good judgment. Her book is about learning by doing, about growing and growing up, about Washington, and about a woman liberated by both circumstance and her own great strengths.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Personal History Specifications

In lieu of an unrevealing Famous-People-I-Have-Known autobiography, the owner of the Washington Post has chosen to be remarkably candid about the insecurities prompted by remote parents and a difficult marriage to the charismatic, manic-depressive Phil Graham, who ran the newspaper her father acquired. Katharine's account of her years as subservient daughter and wife is so painful that by the time she finally asserts herself at the Post following Phil's suicide in 1963 (more than halfway through the book), readers will want to cheer. After that, Watergate is practically an anticlimax.

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Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror Review

Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror Overview

Years before the public knew about bin Laden, Bill Clinton did. Bin Laden first attacked Americans during Clinton's presidential transition in December 1992. He struck again at the World Trade Center in February 1993. Over the next eight years the arch-terrorist's attacks would escalate, killing hundreds and wounding thousands - while Clinton did his best to stymie the FBI and CIA, and refused to wage a real war on terror. Why?

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Check Out Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography for $77.49

Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography Review

Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography Overview

He was a fierce and controversial Civil War officer, an unschooled but brilliant cavalryman, an epic figure in America s most celebrated war. A superb tactician and ferocious fighter, Nathan Bedford Forrest revolutionized the way armies fought in the course of rising from private to lieutenant general in the Confederate Army.

In this detailed and fascinating account of the legend of the ''Wizard of the Saddle,'' we see a man whose strengths and flaws were both of towering proportions, a man possessed of physical valor perhaps unprecedented among his countrymen. And, ironically, Forrest--the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan--was a man whose social attitudes may well have changed farther in the direction of racial enlightenment over the span of his lifetime than those of most American historical figures.

Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography Specifications

Nathan Bedford Forrest was the only soldier to rise from the rank of private to general during the U.S. Civil War. At once "a soft-spoken gentleman of marked placidity and an overbearing bully of homicidal wrath," Forrest is best remembered for the combination of brilliant military leadership and flamboyant bravery that drove his Confederate cavalry troops from victory to victory on the battlefield. His subordinates feared him (he shot those who turned tail), as did his enemies (he rarely lost a fight). General Sherman once said that Forrest must be "hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the [national] treasury." Detractors point out that Forrest never has been exonerated from the Fort Pillow massacre, in which many Union soldiers, most of them black, were slaughtered after attempting to surrender. Following the war, he went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Late in life, however, Forrest disavowed racial hatred and called for black political advancement. Author Jack Hurst has written the essential biography of a complex and compelling man who was arguably the Civil War's most remarkable soldier. (Movie trivia: Forrest Gump's mother named her son after this general.)

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Check Out Worldwar: Striking the Balance for $26.18

Worldwar: Striking the Balance Review

Worldwar: Striking the Balance Overview

During World War II, three of the world's deadliest foes are forced to join efforts to save the planet from aliens, but Earth might be completely destroyed in order to win the war, in the conclusion of Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series.

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Check Out First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War for $62.37

First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War Review

First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War Overview

George Weller was a Pulitzer Prize�winning reporter who covered World War II across Europe, Africa, and Asia. At the war�s end in September 1945, under General MacArthur�s media blackout, correspondents were forbidden to enter both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But instead of obediently staying with the press corps in northern Japan, Weller broke away. The intrepid newspaperman reached Nagasaki just weeks after the atomic bomb hit the city. Boldly presenting himself as a U.S. colonel to the Japanese military, Weller set out to explore the devastation.

As Nagasaki�s first outside observer, long before any American medical aid arrived, Weller witnessed the bomb�s effects and wrote �the anatomy of radiated man.� He interviewed doctors trying to cure those dying mysteriously from �Disease X.� He typed far into every night, sending his forbidden dispatches back to MacArthur�s censors, assuming their importance would make them unstoppable. He was wrong: the U.S. government censored every word, and the dispatches vanished from history.

Weller also became the first to enter the nearby Allied POW camps. From hundreds of prisoners he gathered accounts of watching the atomic explosions bring an end to years of torture and merciless labor in Japanese mines. Their dramatic testimonies sum up one of the least-known chapters of the war�but those stories, too, were silenced.

It is a powerful experience, more than 60 years later, to walk with Weller through the smoldering ruins of Nagasaki, or hear the sagas of prisoners who have just learned that their torment is over, and watch one of the era�s most battle-experienced reporters trying to accurately and unsentimentally convey to the American people scenes unlike anything he�or anyone else�knew.

Weller died in 2002, believing it all lost forever. Months later, his son found a fragile copy in a crate of moldy papers. This historic body of work has never been published.

Along with reports from the brutal POW camps, a stirring saga of the worst of the Japanese �hellships� which carried U.S. prisoners into murder and even cannibalism, and a trove of Weller�s unseen photos, First into Nagasaki provides a moving, unparalleled look at the bomb that killed more than 70,000 people and ended WWII. Amid current disputes over the controlled embedding of journalists in war zones and a government�s right to keep secrets, it reminds us how such courageous rogue reporting is still essential to learning the truth.

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War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning Review

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning Feature

• ISBN13: 9781400104581
• Condition: New
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War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning Overview

As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies, corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting basic human desires.

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