Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-porch AnarchistsIn 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. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - CurrerBell - LibraryThingI'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 ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - cyclopaedantic - LibraryThingQuite 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 ... Read full review
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