The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith With Our Values in a Dangerous World | 
 enlarge | Author: Anne-marie Slaughter
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $5.39
You Save: $10.56 (66%)
New (13) Used (8) from $5.39
Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 316906
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0465078095
Dewey Decimal Number: 170.973
EAN: 9780465078097
ASIN: 0465078095
Publication Date: May 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Hardcover edition. Brand new - Most copies have a publishers overstock mark (Publisher close-outs usually have a small ink mark or stamp at the base of the book, but are otherwise brand new.)
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
What values does America truly stand for? In The Idea That Is America, a preeminent foreign policy scholar elegantly reminds us of the essential principles on which our nation was established: liberty, democracy, equality, tolerance, faith, justice, and humility. Our ongoing struggle to live up to America’s great promise matters not only to us, but also to the billions of people everywhere who look to the United States to lead, protect, and inspire the world. In The Idea That Is America, Anne-Marie Slaughter shows us the way forward.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Good Conversation Starter May 6, 2008
Professor Slaughter's book concerning the essential ideas that make up the foundation of our country provides a great opening for discussions in the classroom, book club, or around the dinner table. It does not matter if you agree with her political orientation as she does a reasonable job of presenting multiple perspectives of each "idea". Even for the ones that are clearly biased, they can still be used to liven up a debate. Ultimately, however, the core values she discusses are things that we should constantly remember; engaging in civil discourse to debate how we get there is more important than following her recommendations.
 Not the best March 22, 2008
This book was required for my Political Science class and it is terribly one sided and the facts are incorrect. I would not recommend this book. :(
A Benchmark for Re-alignment March 17, 2008
America's foreign policy during the last 7 years has been a bit of a self-denial and self-obliteration. It is needless to enumerate the numerous damages caused by imprudent White House's decisions under the Bush administration. Anne-Marie Slaughter, in a methodology blended with the legal reasoning and the political scientist's analysis, shows how liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith--declared core values of US liberal democratic tradition--have been cheated upon.
The ongoing US presidential race is about who is likely to restore America's credibility and trust. In the debates about what ought to be reformed or in 'force majeur' disbanded in US foreign policy, I think that Slaughter's book provides a worthwhile conceptual premise, a sort of 'benchmark for re-alignment'.
Cyril Fegue
 Tough read for born skeptic October 25, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I just began this book last night. I intend to read it as objectively as I can. The reason for this is that its title, The Idea that Is America, strikes me as an approach to the stark division lines now clear in this country that is long overdue. I congratulate Ms. Slaughter for her foresight.
However:
I have to declare that some early statements place the author's judgement in high question for me. They are:
"Everyone around that [family dinner] table [at her grandparent's home in Belgium] knew that without the willingness of American soldiers and taxpayers to sacrifice their lives and dollars, Belgium would have become a German protectorate. America might not always live up to its own ideals, but overall, American power had made the world a better place."
[Preface, page 15]
These words strike me as hopelessly, suicidally, Chamberlainly, pretty-young-lady-with-lots-of-law-courses-and-much-comfort-living-the-life-of-elite-academic-bureaucrat-at-Princeton-and-no-grasp-none-at-all-of-worldly-reality-LY NAIVE.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Universe, do you not understand that without the enormous sacrifice in blood, treasure, and misery of all the Allied peoples that Belgium and many other nations and peoples would NOT have become German protectorates, but would have ceased to exist at all? THERE WOULD NOW BE NO BELGIUM, AND THERE WOULD NOW BE NO BELGIANS. Precisely the same fate awaited many other nations, indeed, possibly all other nations.
I hold that for ultra-tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Tojo, Mao, Pol-Pot, Osama bin Laden and yes, Saddam Hussein - for such evil leaders any and all peoples who represent the slightest obstacle to their total power over all humanity are, in their minds, solely fit for ignominious extermination.
Ms. Slaughter speaks of the cataclysms of World War - I, II, Cold, and anti-Terror - as if they were different years for the World Cup. One can almost hear her whisper "Well, if we lose this year, we'll just try harder next year." But these wars are final. There is no next year. If we lose any of them we are finished forever. FOREVER.
So, for the record, the Allied Powers, in particular American Power, did somewhat more than "make the world a better place" - they throttled the threats of Nazism, Communism, and Militarism and made it a place once again fit for civilized human habitation. But we still have Terrorism to go.
I wonder what Ms. Slaughter's advice will be. Back to the book, trying not to be so damned skeptical, but wondering how I can do that.
Not cynicism, not nationalism, but patriotism September 3, 2007
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
What is the point of required courses in American history? It would be easy to dismiss the history lessons that we were taught in high school as revisionist propaganda to indoctrinate us with idealized pilgrims, patriots, pioneers, and transcendental pragmatists. Yet, more honest histories intended to correct the myths, such as James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and Carolyn Baker's U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You, cynically reveal a dark and sinister past that fails to teach us what distinguishes America from Afghanistan or central Africa (other than geography and the efficient exploitation of rich natural resources). It doesn't help that we live in a time obsessed with rewriting the present through an entire industry devoted to political `spin' and what Stephen Colbert has aptly named "truthiness." Witness the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of our efforts to bring democracy to middle eastern oil-states, even while our special interest groups routinely buy political favors, to celebrate our system of justice, yet enable the war crimes of Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo, to rally to the cause of environmentalism while using natural resources at a per capita rate that exceeds almost all major first-world nations by a wide margin.
What makes Dr. Slaughter's new book, The Idea that is America so important is that, by refocusing the history of our past deeds as a struggle to live up to our shared principles, it presents a third alternative to hopeless cynicism and blind nationalism. Slaughter, in this storied and passionate book, admits in detail troubling aspects of our country's unglorified past and present, while also providing a clear expression of our founding ideals and how they might lead us out of impotence. It is our values, she states, our deeply-held belief in the ideas of liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility and faith that can help us to illuminate our shadows again and again, and to find a way to see beyond them to a more hopeful future. It was our belief in freedom, for example, that led to the end of slavery, our belief in democracy that gave women and blacks the right to vote, and even our belief in justice and limited executive power that inspired the impeachment of Nixon.
Thinking of those times in our history when adherence to our founding principles sparked changes that we now take for granted, I can, at least for the moment, feel guardedly patriotic (though decidedly not nationalistic). Slaughter never suggests that this war between a history of ideals and reality is easy. Rather she depicts it as a long and intensely deliberate process. And we should not expect a happy ending. Rather we should not see an ending at all, only a process that we are all a part of, one we should all be a part of, to the best of our abilities.
|
|
|
News 
