“A Thousand Small Sanities” by Adam Gopnik

(from the editor)- “A stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author.

Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought.

A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history – and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.”

From The Guardian review-  “…Gopnik alerts us to an emergency. “Gangster-style authoritarianism” threatens the US, Russia, Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, while our own lying Brexiters prate about national grandeur and use “parliamentary proceduralism”, as Gopnik shrewdly says, to “corrupt and co-opt potential resistance”. Can liberal values be revived to save us?

Given the prevailing gloom, Gopnik’s definition of liberalism is cautious and it depends on two words whose awkwardness, odd in such an elegant writer, betrays their doubtful appeal. One is “fallibilism”, the other is “imperfectability”: we are a shoddy species, unworthy of utopia. I’d have thought that this was reason for conservatively upholding the old order, but for Gopnik it’s our recidivism that makes liberal reform so necessary. We must always try to do better, cleaning up our messes. The sanity in the book’s title extends to sanitation: Gopnik whimsically honours the sewerage system of Victorian London as a shining if smelly triumph of liberal policy…”

The BOOK SPOTLIGHT at Wallace Books-   We always link our Book Spotlight to Powells.com so you can order the book if you’re interested, but it’s also available Sellwood’s Wallace Books, in the  “Tom Dwyer Book Spotlight” display.  Check it out!