Publishers Weekly

Eric Liu in Publishers Weekly | 'The Monday Interview: Eric Liu, of The True Patriot'

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:26:00 -0400

An interview with Eric Liu, co-author with Nick Hanauer of The True Patriot, which was published by Sasquatch in January 2008.

Publishers Weekly: How would you describe The True Patriot?

Eric Liu: The book is an argument that we’ve got to reclaim patriotism in more progressive terms. It’s written in the style of a Thomas Paine pamphlet, and is meant to provoke debate about the ways in which over the last four decades patriotism as an idea has been hijacked by the right and surrendered by the left--to the detriment of both. We put the book out there to reframe the conversation and take it out of the realm of reflex and gauzy cliché and reground it in a set of moral principles. People have a list of clichés built up in their mind, either positive or negative, and they’re far removed from truly revisiting the moral core of what it truly means to put country before self. LINK

What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers

Richard Brookhiser

Basic, $25 (256p) ISBN 0-465-00819-4

Reviewed by Michael Lind

It might be thought that nothing new could be said about America's founding fathers, in the midst of the contemporary avalanche of tomes about Washington, Jefferson and other early American leaders. But Rick Brookhiser, inspired perhaps by a Christian motto-"What Would Jesus Do?" (WWJD)-has come up with a way to describe the views of the architects of the American republic that is as entertaining as it is informative.

"Americans have been asking what the founders would do since the founders died," writes Brookhiser, a journalist and historian (Alexander Hamilton and The Way of the WASP ). Combining the skills of a first-rate writer with those of a medium at a seance, Brookhiser channels the spirits of eminent early Americans in discussing contemporary public debates.

At times, Brookhiser has to stretch to find an analogy between the era of the founders and today, such as his comparison between stem cell research and the old practice of robbing graves for medical research.

In other cases, however, the conceit works to shed light on present and past alike. Should the U.S. attempt to spread democracy around the world? Brookhiser makes a case for the caution of Alexander Hamilton rather than the optimism of Thomas Jefferson. The war on drugs? "The founders would not have fought a war on drugs," but would have taxed them instead, Brookhiser declares, reasoning from the excise tax on whiskey imposed by the federal government. What would the founders do about Social Security? "Social Security follows none of their models (family provision, charity, reward for service, investment)."

The book reveals that many of the public policy questions confronting the early American republic are similar to challenges Americans wrestle with today. The values of 18th-century Americans, by contrast, were radically different and benighted by modern standards. Jefferson, while opposing slavery, argued that blacks were inferior and should be expatriated from the United States. The founders took a male-dominated society for granted, though Hamilton was willing to consider sweatshop work for women: "It is worthy of particular remark, that, in general, women and children are rendered more useful... by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be."

With a rare union of wit and scholarship, What Would the Founders Do? presents history as a source of continuing debates, rather than as a set of answers. Comparing the founders to present-day Americans, Brookhiser concludes: "We can be as intelligent as they were, and as serious, as practical, and as brave.... We can; as they said, all men are created equal."(May 5)

The Power of The Book;

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Religion and politics used to be the two great taboos of polite conversation. Today politics is everywhere, right down to the Fox and CNN ubiquitous at the gym. But religion remains a special case. The mainstream news media--television in particular, which is where many Americans get the bulk of their information--treads lightly when it touches it at all, afraid of giving offense or oversimplifying and reaping the consequences. Talking heads pontificating about Islam as a source of terror is not a discussion of religion. Evangelicals almost never appear on mainstream TV, not even Fox. I can't think of the last time I saw a rabbi or an imam on TV, except maybe after a terror attack being asked to disclaim responsibility. It's rare to find religion on the airwaves, except on religious channels.

But books are a different story. The breadth, depth, and occasionally even length of the book affords the chance to take on complex religious subjects with a nuance and richness lacking in other media. And the bookstore shelves reflect this reality. Somehow there is no taboo on reading about religion, and religion books sell, even when they are slighted by reviewers.

The reason for the persistence of books on religion comes from the history of reading itself in the Western world. The first printed book was the Bible, and for generations the Bible was used as a reader in schools, including public ones. So perhaps it should not be surprising that in our majority-Protestant country, religious reading remains central. Our book groups (long may they prosper!) are, in a sense, secular Bible-study circles, and we look to our literature to provide the meaning that has always been associated with faith.

We are no longer primarily a Protestant country, however. Catholics and Jews, and now Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others have brought their own approaches--and their own sacred scriptures--to increase our religious diversity. That diversity requires us to engage both of the old taboo topics at once, religion and its relation to our politics. Here, too, the bookshelves are full of new offerings.

Jim Wallis's God's Politics (Harper San Francisco, Jan. 2005) takes the bull by the horns, challenging the Left to wrest religion back from the Right. The forthcoming How the Republicans Stole Christmas: The Republican Party's Declared Monopoly on Religion and What Democrats Can Do to Take It Back by Bill Press (Doubleday, Oct.) promises to add another voice on that topic. Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers (Metropolitan Books, 2004) found an audience, although (or maybe because) its hagiographic tone in praise of secularism might have been thought better suited to a religious tome. Meanwhile, Marci Hamilton, in one of Cambridge University Press's rare forays into the general trade, argues in God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law that religion has gotten away with murder in letting its adherents avoid the law on religious grounds--an argument calculated to anger fundamentalists and civil libertarians alike.

Newspapers and magazines continue to provide a more thorough and consistent coverage of religion than television, but my own contributions to the debates, After Jihad (FSG, 2003) and Divided by God (FSG, July) could never have been sustained in an article alone. The first focused on Islam and democracy--not a suitable topic for a glib sound bite, either in the U.S. or in Iraq. The essay version of Divided by God, published in The New York Times Sunday magazine (July 3), managed to pique readers' interest. But to give the history of church and state in America even in 8,000 words is hopeless. For that I needed a book.

Getting the public interested in religion, then, is no problem. The challenge is for books to help shape our national conversation. Publishers and booksellers, so much less dependent on the fickle whims of advertisers than other media, are the best hope for this crucial conversation to happen. Reading may be for many an essential path to religious experience. But we have to live together in public. Religious diversity is too important a feature of our nation and our world to be limited to TV sound-bites or to the privacy of one's own favorite reading nook.