Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-porch Anarchists

Bill Kauffman

ISI Books, 2006 - Political Science - 210 pages

In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman introduces us to the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life. Blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman provides fresh portaiture of such American originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other Americans who can’t—or shouldn’t—be filed away in the usual boxes labeled “liberal” and “conservative.” Ranging from Millard Fillmore to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - CurrerBell - LibraryThing

I've been familiar with Bill Kauffman's columns for some years now in The American Conservative magazine (and he's in large part the reason I read the magazine in the first place), but his AmCon ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - cyclopaedantic - LibraryThing

Quite an engaging book about uniquely American cultural and political figures and the values of independence, localism and personalism. I disagree with Kauffman on quite a few particulars, but I ...

Contents

• CHAPTER: 35
• CHAPTER THREE: 51
• CHAPTER FOUR: 89

About the author

Bill Kauffman is the author of five books, most recently the localist manifesto Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, which won the 2003 national “Sense of Place” award from Writers & Books. His other books include a novel, a travel book, and works about American isolationists and critics of progress. He writes for the Wall Street Journal, the American Enterprise, Counterpunch, and the American Conservative, among other publications. Kauffman lives in his native Genesee County, New York, with his wife Lucine and their daughter Gretel.

Other Titles by Bill Kauffman:

Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive, Bill Kauffman, Henry Holt & Company, March 2004.   With Good Intentions?: Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America, Bill Kauffman, Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated, October 1998.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-porch Anarchists
• Author: Bill Kauffman
• Publisher: ISI Books, 2006
• ISBN: 1932236872, 9781932236873
• Length: 210 pages
• Subjects: Political Science / American Government / General; Political Science / History & Theory; Political Science / Political Ideologies / Conservatism & Liberalism