Blood of the Liberals - Hardcover

Packer, George

3.93

125 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374251428 ISBN 13: 9780374251420

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

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An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history

George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century--an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely--and ultimately fatally--tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, this is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

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Praise for Blood of the Liberals

"I've never read a book quite like George Packer's Blood of the Liberals. More than a learned history and revealing memoir, it's also an unsentimental but deeply felt love letter to the father he barely knew and the grandfather he never met. Packer shows American liberals where we've been and where we must go by sharing his story-a story that is heartbreaking, hopeful, and beautifully drawn."-George Stephanopoulos

"Here is a family's story that tells us so very much about America, and about idealism as it engages, at a cost, with politics, a book that will teach all of us so very much about our nation's history."-Robert Coles

"With thoughtful compassion and scrupulous decency, George Packer has written a stunningly honest, *necessary* memoir of his family, which doubles as a political history of the last hundred years. Parts of it have the absorbing quality of a murder mystery or a horror film: you cringe at the collision of good intentions and bad judgment, wanting to yell out to the participants "No! don't!"-only to realize their confusions mirror uncannily your own. An admirable work of conscience and literary art."-Philip Lopate

About the Author:

George Packer is a journalist (The Village of Waiting) and novelist (The Half-Man and Central Square) who has written for Harper's, among numerous other journals and publications. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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