Blood of the Liberals

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by George Packer

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc

Due/Published July 2001, 416 pages, paper

ISBN 0374527784

The legacy and future of American liberalism explored through one family's history.

George Packer's maternal grandfather was a populist congressman from Alabama — an agrarian liberal in the Jeffersonian mold who ended up opposing the New Deal. Packer's Jewish father was a Kennedy-era liberal at Stanford whose convictions were fatally tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer explores the ideals that shaped the lives of his forebears and describes his own struggle to carry on their tradition in our time, when large numbers of Americans have lost faith in politics.

"The story of each generation of my family," Packer writes, "is in a way the story of an inherited idea crashing up against the hard rock of new circumstance." Blood of the Liberals gives a political voice to a new generation that has grown up without the certainties of earlier ones.

George Packer's journalism and essays have appeared in Harper's; The New York Times; the 1997 Pushcart Prize anthology, The Art of the Essay; and elsewhere. His latest book is Blood of the Liberals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

"It is difficult to imagine a more precise and pointed summary of the current state of American liberalism . . . Provocative — and persuasive." (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World)