Books

"Anyone who loves LA struggles with it, has been obliged to reconcile the disparity between what LA is supposed to be and what it actually is," says Gregory Rodriguez, executive director of Zócalo Public Square and a Times op-ed columnist. ...

The Next Progressive Era provides a blueprint for a re-empowered progressive movement and describes its implications for American families, work, health, food, and savings.

Freedom is at the heart of the American identity, shaping both personal lives and political values. The ideal of authoring one's own life has inspired the country's best and worst moments--courage and emancipation, but also fear, delusion, and pointless war.

For his part, Jedediah Purdy creates an idea-packed sandwich in “A Tolerable Anarchy”: first a slice of radical American autonomy, which frightened both Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke (unnecessarily); then a slice of practical constraint on that autonomy, produced by Mother Nature herself in the form of a warming climate; and in between, a tour of American political history as it relates to the essence of freedom in different eras. This tour of freedom and its discontents passes through slavery… more

Book Review of A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom by Jedediah Purdy. Thank God for Bernie Madoff. Without him, who would be the face of the Great Collapse of 2008? Before "the Ponz" pled guilty to running what is surely the biggest investor scam in American history, wrote Chadwick Matlin last week in a ...

For the record, "Yes we can" emerged as a slogan later and less deliberately than one might think. The year was 1972, three years after César Chávez had appeared on the cover of Time magazine and two years after he had led farmworkers to a major victory against grape producers in California. Chávez was in Arizona trying to reverse a law prohibiting strikes by farmworkers during harvest time. Supporters of Chávez told him the law couldn’t be repealed. "No se puede," they said. Dolores Huerta, a

William H. Goetzmann believes America at its best embodies what he calls "cosmotopian ideals": the United States is a global civilization where all human ideas and experiences mingle. Cosmotopia is the polestar of his strange and valuable book. "Beyond the Revolution" is scornful of regionalists, traditionalists and anyone else who would restrict the scope of American identity. It is richly populated with radicals and utopians who, with one eye on the innermost soul and the other on world history, created a tradition of open-ended experiment. Like many… more

Today's event has been postponed, due to the inclement weather. We apologize for the inconvenience, and will announce the new date as soon as it is determined. 

Just the thought of another book about Middle East policy under President Bill Clinton might make the most stout-hearted reader quake; but he or she would be well advised to consider Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Martin Indyk. Indyk, who was (twice) U.S. ambassador to Israel, and now directs the Saban Center of Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, has managed to write a new, very readable chronicle of Mideast policy during the Clinton