Ark of the Liberties: America and the World (Hardcover)

~ Ted Widmer (Author)
Key Phrases: United States, Cold War, New World (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From the colonial period through our current age, Widmer traces the legacy of American liberty with all its respect, contradictions and misapplications. His narrative explains the significance of the U.S.'s fall from international popularity in the last decade. Widmer's admiration for his country doesn't prevent him from recognizing its faults and, at times, the country's inability to hold true to the ark of liberty set forth in the national narrative. Widmer's writing is wonderfully nuanced, extrapolating large ideas and themes from the smallest of actions and symbols. William Hughes's narration doesn't do the book justice. His delivery lacks that subtlety, specificity and energy that Widmer's impressive and witty text needs. A Hill & Wang hardcover (reviewed online). (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Review

“In this exploration of the United States’ promotion of liberty across the globe, Ted Widmer offers an examination of our history that should influence the way we think about our place in the twenti-first-century world. At a time when we need to restore America’s standing in so many places, Ark of the Liberties shows us how we can do it if we remain true to our historic ideals.” —Bill Clinton

 

“Ted Widmer wants to restore idealism’s good name. In the spirit of an old-fashioned jeremiad, he summons his countrymen to return to their own highest standards and properly play their anointed role in the world.” —David M. Kennedy, The Washington Post

 

“Widmer has written an ambitious account of the enduring global reach of America, whose uniqueness he attributes to the millennial outlook of the Europeans who first settled here.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

 

“Widmer’s book is both a primer and a call to faith of sorts—a historically cast reminder.” —Art Winslow, The Los Angeles Times

 

“[A] valuable history of the ideas that have shaped American foreign policy.” —Chris Tucker, The Dallas Morning News

 

“A bold, sweeping, critical, ultimately admiring and optimistic (but cautionary) birthday card to America.” —Doug Riggs, The Providence Journal

 

“Fed up with a never-ending war and the state of the union? This fascinating story of America’s epic rise to freedom and world power might renew your patriotism.” —The Chicago Tribune

 

“A sweeping, elegant history of the ideas that shape American foreign policy. And no idea has influenced America’s understanding of its role in the world as decisively as the concept of liberty. Widmer meticulously traces the contradictions, triumphs, and betrayals of liberty that have unfolded across the centuries of the American experience.”—Evan R. Goldstein, The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

“This is a wonderful and much-needed book. It will give even the most hardened cynic reason for renewed hope in America’s future.” —Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

 

“A taut and timely account of America’s search for its place in the world. Ted Widmer probes both our exalted national rhetoric and our occasionally odd international behavior; the result is a wise analysis of America’s evolution from the nation where liberty dwells to the one that shows up—sometimes—where it does not.” —Stacy Schiff

 

“Ark of the Liberties should be read by all who want to understand why the United States behaves as it does in the world.” —Gordon Wood, Brown University

 

“With great skill, eloquence, and frequent humor, Widmer has written the history of America for all of us who care about our country and the direction we must take in the years ahead to be true to our ideals and regain the respect we have lost in today’s world.” —Ted Kennedy

“Finally, someone has sent out a brilliant team called Ted Widmer—an historian, a cartographer, a rocker-poet composer, a White House speechwriter, and one damn good storyteller—to capture the many ways that we Americans have franchised our new nation: as idea, ideal, and pure product of a land where liberty can be hard to come by. What an affectionate, optimistic, and irreverent WPA Guide to every era of an astonishingly global America.” —David Michaelis, author of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography

“In Ark of the Liberties, Ted Widmer retrieves the history of our country’s profound contributions to human freedom, without once falling prey to pieties or bromides. Widmer’s ark actually describes a great moral arc that, despite its manifest failures and contradictions, has finally, in Theodore Parker’s phrase, bent toward justice. Effortlessly combining grand interpretation with reappraisals of key figures and events, Widmer’s account is unfailingly fascinating—and could not be more timely.” —Sean Wilentz, Princeton University, author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008

“With boldness and humor, Widmer grapples with an idea central to our nation’s history, while providing a number of fresh insights into U.S. foreign policy and presidencies along the way. While the philosophical problem of universals is probably irresolvable, Widmer asks the right question at each stage of his history: What, exactly, do we mean by liberty?” —The Innocent Smith Journal

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; First Edition edition (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809027356
• ISBN-13: 978-0809027354
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #685,050 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A revelation on every page - a treasure trove for history-lovers, July 15, 2008

By	Anne Elk (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

This book is a delicious series of essays documenting America's relation to and impact on the concept of liberty, beginning with the earliest days of colonialization. Widmer has assembled an unprecedented collection of material, selecting the most provocative and telling events in the history of our self-assigned role as liberty's hero. A treat for those prone to despair in these benighted - but, as Widmer shows, not unprecedented - times.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Timely and Highly Readable, July 19, 2008

By	Oxford mom - See all my reviews

Let's face it. We Americans have a pretty sad track record when it comes to
knowing much about our nation's history, and understanding how our history
shapes our current lives and futures. With the United States now having more
interaction than ever with the rest of the world, it is even more critical
for each of us to gain knowledge of our past, and especially in the area of
foreign relations.

This book offers a timely and highly readable portrait of a fascinating part
of America's story: how the country was shaped from earliest moments to
become "the world's guarantor of liberty," and how it has variously grappled
with and cultivated that role in different eras.

The author is informed and entertaining. He sweeps readers through five
centuries of colorful, often uplifting, sometimes disturbing aspects of
America's unique qualities, beginning well before colonization and moving
through to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm one of those Americans who is sheepishly ignorant of a lot of the
standard US history we're meant to have learned in high school or college. I
was worried that this book would assume that I already knew the basics, and
that it would contain too much about specialized foreign policy matters to
hold my interest. But I enjoyed Ark of the Liberties as an overview of
American history through the framing subject of liberty. It turns out that
even pre-colonial aspects of America are shaped by ancient ideas and images,
such as the Garden of Eden, are associated with freedom from rules. The book
explains how freedom became part of America's identity even before it
existed as a nation. And, as someone with ancestors and close relatives who
have served in foreign wars including in Iraq, I was especially interested
in the coverage of American ideas of freedom as they have been used in
different wars and in diplomatic relations that prevented military conflict.

The book follows some major threads that carry the theme of liberty through
America's history. The most enduring ones are religious, and associate
liberty with heavenly paradise or, at times, with diabolical lawlessness
(America as Satan!). Other recurring themes (isolationism, internationalism,
realism, idealism) appear in foreign policy arenas such as our presidents'
views of liberating others or 'exporting freedom'. The author examines how
variations on initial building blocks of America's humanistic (universal)
ideals have influenced US foreign policy for good and ill throughout the
country's history.

I count myself among those Americans who are tired of hearing how
pathetically ignorant we are about our past. I would recommend this book to
anyone eager to break the bad habit of avoiding American history lessons.
Ark of the Liberties is a fun read. Many of its details will grip you, and
overall it will equip you with an understanding of the big patterns that
form America's exceptional place in the world, its real and imagined
qualities as a country like no other. The author does unveil some strong
political leanings in the last parts of the book (he was a foreign
speechwriter in the Clinton White House, and Clinton provides a glowing
blurb for the book). But ultimately Widmer proves to be first and foremost a
historian, sometimes a quirky and very funny one, with a passion for his
subject. Plus he has a gift for clear, engaging prose (not that I would
expect much else from a world-class speechwriter).

1.0 out of 5 stars A Peek at the Mind of a Liberal, March 4, 2009

By	Redmund K. Sum (Los Altos, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The following is from the first chapter of this book:

It does not take too much effort to perceive an erotic energy pulsing beneath these breathless accounts (of America.) Far from thinking the world flat, Columbus likened the earth to a pear shape with a nipple, and throughout the literature of exploration one encounters a relentless emphasis on fecundity, both human and vegetable. In retrospect, the use of the term Virginia to describe this land appears to have been somewhat ironic....In narrative after narrative, the feeling of liberty was enhanced by the description of unclothed women, eager...

To say this book is full of historical fluff is to give historical fluff a bad name. Small wonder Bill Clinton's and Ted Kennedy's praises for the book topped the list at the back of book.

As the narrative progressed, things did not improve much.

I read (but did not finish) this book in an effort to try to understand the viewpoint of the liberal. I got more than I asked for. To be fair, this book is a small improvement over Howard Zinn's.