The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America

History

Bosworth, David

World

Front Porch Republic Books

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America: Writings, 1986-2014

Bill Kauffman has carved out an idiosyncratic identity quite unlike any other American writer. Praised by the likes of Gore Vidal, Benjamin Schwarz, and George McGovern, he has, with a distinctive and slashingly witty, learnedly allusive style, illumed forgotten corners of American history, articulated a defiant and passionate localism, and written with love and dark humor of his repatriation.Poetry Night at the Ballpark gathers the best of Bill Kauffman's essays and journalism in defense and explication of his alternative America--or Americas. Its discrete pieces are bound by a thematic unity and propulsive energy and are full of unexpected (yet startlingly apposite) connections and revelatory linkages. Whether he's writing about conservative Beats, backyard astronomers, pacifist West Pointers, or Middle America in the movies, Bill Kauffman will challenge, maybe even change, the way you look at American politics and the American provinces.

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America

Literature & Fiction

Kauffman, Bill

History & Criticism

America Moved: Booth Tarkington's Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869-1928 brings together for the first time all of the autobiographical writings of Booth Tarkington, one of the most successful and best-loved writers in American history. These are the memoirs of one of America's greatest literary figures--and one of the keenest interpreters of American manners and mores.During his lifetime, Tarkington was immensely popular. From 1902 to 1932, nine of his books were top ten bestsellers, The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams won Pulitzer Prizes, and Tarkington's Penrod stories became widely recognized as young-adult classics.America Moved demonstrates that Tarkington's writing and powers of social observation stand the test of time. Written in a genial, easygoing style, America Moved gently but consistently interrogates the values of the new commercial-industrial age, especially its obsessions with speed, growth, and efficiency. The humane skepticism Tarkington directs in these pages toward the automobile, sprawl, and the cult of Progress identifies him as a voice quite at home in the twenty-first century.America Moved will delight readers with an enjoyable eyewitness account of the vast social and cultural changes that transformed America between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

America Moved

TARKINGTON, BOOTH

The Culinary Plagiarist

More than a collection of vignettes and stories from garden, grill, and kitchen, The Culinary Plagiarist is a sustained adventure in gustatory delight, an intensely private but candid account of desire and all its objects. Opinionated on the full range of human experience, from fasting to inebriety, from sports to politics, from religion to raunch, it is at once serious, humorous, ironic, reflective, grateful, allusive, and appetitive. Along the way it offers a defense of small-scale, local life, of family, of place, and of "the bread we do not live alone by." And also the drinks. Don't forget the drinks. This is a book for people who enjoy being alive, whether in the kitchen, the pasture, the library, the barn, the trout stream, the henhouse (or the doghouse), or the bedroom.

The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand

Biographies & Memoirs

Peters, Jason

Professionals & Academics

Although the financial disaster of 2008 proved devastatingly quick, the evolution of the bad faith that drove the collapse is a more gradual story, and one that David Bosworth powerfully narrates in The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession, his sweeping history of the forces driving ethical, political, and economic change over the last sixty years. Here, Bosworth traces how the commercialization of public spaces and electronic information has created a new and enclosed American place. Chapter by chapter, he then shows how the materialist values of this Virtual America have suffused our everyday lives, co-opting the themes of our narratives, the planks of our parties, the practices of our professions, and the most intimate aspects of our personal lives, including our beliefs about God, marriage, and childcare. From Ronald Reagan and Disneyland to modern pharmacology and "prosperity theology" from the phony conservatism of Wall Street to the faux rebellion of "transgressive" art, Bosworth's alternative story of American life since 1950 relentlessly challenges today's dominant narratives--narratives that, as he reveals, made both the calamitous invasion of Iraq and the economic collapse of 2008 all too likely.

The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession

Americas

Bill Kauffman has carved out an idiosyncratic identity quite unlike any other American writer. Praised by the likes of Gore Vidal, Benjamin Schwarz, and George McGovern, he has, with a distinctive and slashingly witty, learnedly allusive style, illumed forgotten corners of American history, articulated a defiant and passionate localism, and written with love and dark humor of his repatriation. Poetry Night at the Ballpark gathers the best of Bill Kauffman's essays and journalism in defense and explication of his alternative America--or Americas. Its discrete pieces are bound by a thematic unity and propulsive energy and are full of unexpected (yet startlingly apposite) connections and revelatory linkages. Whether he's writing about conservative Beats, backyard astronomers, pacifist West Pointers, or Middle America in the movies, Bill Kauffman will challenge, maybe even change, the way you look at American politics and the American provinces.

America Moved: Booth Tarkington's Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869-1928 brings together for the first time all of the autobiographical writings of Booth Tarkington, one of the most successful and best-loved writers in American history. These are the memoirs of one of America's greatest literary figures-and one of the keenest interpreters of American manners and mores. During his lifetime, Tarkington was immensely popular. From 1902 to 1932, nine of his books were top ten bestsellers, The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams won Pulitzer Prizes, and Tarkington's Penrod stories became widely recognized as young-adult classics. America Moved demonstrates that Tarkington's writing and powers of social observation stand the test of time. Written in a genial, easygoing style, America Moved gently but consistently interrogates the values of the new commercial-industrial age, especially its obsessions with speed, growth, and efficiency. The humane skepticism Tarkington directs in these pages toward the automobile, sprawl, and the cult of Progress identifies him as a voice quite at home in the twenty-first century. America Moved will delight readers with an enjoyable eyewitness account of the vast social and cultural changes that transformed America between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

America Moved: Booth Tarkington's Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869-1928

Plutocratic Socialism

Review\n“Our republic is faltering. The left pushes us into the dystopia of identity politics; the right talks incessantly of free markets and of tradition. Missing in the discussion is the one thing necessary to stabilize the American commercial republic: private property. No private property, no middle-class republic. Mark Mitchell has done us the invaluable service of reintroducing this crucial consideration into our debates about why America has lost her way and how to correct her course.” 
—Joshua Mitchell, Georgetown University\n“With clarity, grace, and erudition lightly worn, Mitchell takes aim at the mutually reinforcing pathologies, plutocracy and socialism, that are undermining the theory and practice of the middle-class republic. Mitchell demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that only a middle-class, multiracial republic of civic-minded property owners can save us from the unholy alliance of plutocratic masters and despotic woke ideologues. Bracing wisdom for our time.” 
—Daniel J. Mahoney, Assumption University, emeritus\n“Hilaire Belloc called it ‘the servile state.’ Mark Mitchell offers the contemporary label ‘plutocratic socialism,’ meaning the union of big government and big business, now amplified by the corrupt ideology of ‘wokism.’ With fresh insight and power, Mitchell rehabilitates the case for building a middle-class democracy resting on property rights and self-imposed moral limits as the only way to build a truly free and progressive society. This is political philosophy at its urgent best.” 
—Allan Carlson, author of The New Agrarian Mind\nA proletarianized citizenry ruled by a class of insolent plutocrats is incompatible with the republican form of government established by the US Constitution. Without an effective majority of citizens who own property and whose character has been shaped by property ownership—a vibrant middle class—the Founders’ Constitution will not survive. Our current age of Plutocratic Socialism is a specific manifestation of a pathology the Founders feared. Recovery must begin with a simple, yet profound, axiom: private property and political freedom stand or fall together.

Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class

Politics & Social Sciences

Mitchell, Mark T.

Politics & Government

Living in Language

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