or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
Sorry!
More Buying Choices
48 used & new from $0.01

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Blood of the Liberals
 
 
Tell the Publisher!
I’d like to read this book on Kindle

Don’t have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.
 
  

Blood of the Liberals (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In the year of my grandfather's birth, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant became President and General Nathan Bedford Forrest (CSA) resigned as Grand Wizard and dissolved..." (more)
Key Phrases: convict lease, George Huddleston, New Deal, Blood of the Liberals (more...)
4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

List Price: $16.00
Price: $12.48 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $3.52 (22%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).

Want it delivered Tuesday, November 10? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
16 new from $3.90 32 used from $0.01

Also Available in:

List Price: Our Price: Other Offers:
Hardcover (1st) $26.00 $19.76 58 used & new from $0.32

Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer

Blood of the Liberals + The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
  • This item: Blood of the Liberals by George Packer

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

The Village of Waiting

The Village of Waiting

by George Packer
4.6 out of 5 stars (10)  $12.00
Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays (Complete Works of George Orwell)

Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays (Complete Works of George Orwell)

by George Orwell
4.3 out of 5 stars (3)  $18.25
Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

by Robert S. McElvaine
4.4 out of 5 stars (5)  $10.69
All Art Is Propaganda

All Art Is Propaganda

by George Orwell
4.5 out of 5 stars (2)  $10.05
The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Revised Edition with new preface and afterword)

The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Revised Edition with new preface and afterword)

by Tom Engelhardt
4.7 out of 5 stars (7)  $20.26
Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Packer has produced a fascinating personal history while examining why people become liberals even though their efforts frequently seem extremely futile. The author describes the life and times of his Alabama-born maternal grandfather, Congressman George Huddleston, whose brand of liberalism was rooted in Southern agrarian populism and who often opposed FDR's New Deal. Packer also tells of his father, Herbert, whose Jewish American background placed him squarely in the urban liberal tradition of the mid-20th century. His father's life and career ultimately came to a turbulent climax as an administrator at Stanford University during the late 1960s. Finally, in a brief, informative, and moving autobiographical section, Packer recounts the development of his own social and political views following his father's stroke and suicide. The author attempts to demonstrate the ongoing relevance to today's world of a political philosophy that many believe has little future. Packer's combination of personal and historical perspectives, as well as his considerable skill at conveying them, make this work both challenging and enjoyable. Written for the lay reader, it nonetheless avoids oversimplification. Highly recommended.DCharles K. Piehl, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


From The Washington Post

". . . difficult to imagine a more precise and pointed summary of the current state of American liberalism . . . Provocative -- and persuasive."

Product Details

  • Paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (August 1, 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0374527784
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374527785
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #302,498 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

More About the Author

George Packer
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Visit Amazon's George Packer Page

Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
In the year of my grandfather's birth, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant became President and General Nathan Bedford Forrest (CSA) resigned as Grand Wizard and dissolved the recently formed Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, fifty miles south of my grandfather's birthplace in Tennessee. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
convict lease
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
George Huddleston, New Deal, Blood of the Liberals, New York, Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson Democrat, Martin Luther King, Metropolitan Gardens, San Francisco, White House, Civil War, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Wall Street, New City Church, United States, Adlai Stevenson, Executive Committee, Fulton Lewis, Palo Alto, President Sterling, Birmingham News, Carl Spaeth, Gerald Austin, Los Angeles
New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:



Books on Related Topics (learn more)

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?


Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
 
(4)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

 

Customer Reviews

9 Reviews
5 star:
 (7)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.6 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
43 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A voice in the wilderness, June 18, 2002
By Anthony Berno (San Jose, Ca USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
How did such a basic, rational notion as liberalism turn into the favorite epithet of talk-show hosts? What happened to social justice? Where is the freewheeling spirit of the Sixties? These, and other questions, have haunted me for years. Not being well versed in American history, the seemingly abrupt annhiliation of everything "liberal" has caused me great puzzlement and distress.

Packer, in a beautiful amalgam of memoir and history, has written a book that has almost singlehandedly restored my relationship with the past and pointed my way to the future. While as a historical account it is spotty, and as a memoir it is sometimes dry, the heartfelt combination of these two styles has a vitality and immediacy I've never seen anywhere else.

His conclusions, while expansive, are also poignant, with a touch of desperation. In his consideration of the prospects of liberalism in this country, I am reminded of the Monty Python sketch about the parrot - "It's just resting!" - while at the same time I'm stirred by its undercurrent of optimism. His last few words ring in my ears: "We will have a more just society as soon as we want one."

If you sense that, like myself, you are a lost liberal that is trying to find your way in the world, this book is for you.

If you are a Rush Limbaugh dittohead who needs a clue as to what "liberal" really means, this book is for you as well.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Family Story Illuminates Politics of Our time, September 16, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Blood of the Liberals (Hardcover)
This a far better than average memoir. It is a sturdy, well written story that you haven't read before. It is about coming of age after liberalism's big battles are won. Packer looks at the life of his grandfather, his father and his own life (so far)in trying to exemplify politics of intelligence and inclusion. His grandfather was a U.S. Representative George Huddleston Sr. of Birmingham, Al serving from 1916 to l938. As the Depression Congressman from Birmingham he was an advocate for the New Deal until it went too far. His father was a brilliant lawyer and teacher at Stanford who fought the battles of McCarthyism only to be beaten silly in the campus revolts of the 1960s that made "liberalism" and ugly word. Packer himself became a Democratic Socialist during the illiberal age in which we now live, working in a homeless shelter, becoming a carpenter (hiding his Yale degree) in Boston. His story of visiting his Birmingham family in recent years to see the place his grandfather served is just wonderful. His uncle George Huddleston Jr. was elected to Congress as a liberal in 1954 and departed in the Goldwater sweep of the South in 1964 as a conservative as he tried to move right on the race issue. He never made it and didn't return to Alabama until he was to be buried. Packer adventures with his uncle George's widow Aunt AJ in Birmingham today is hilarious and sad. His sketch of businessman Drayton Nabors, a man confident of a Christian a Great Awakening across America but can't imagine an increase in the minimum wage is priceless.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A rallying cry for modern liberalism, December 30, 2001
I really enjoyed Packer's book. I'm roughly a contemporary of his, and experienced the same wrenching events that occurred in modern liberalism during the late 1960s and early 1970s.I'd just finished reading Roth's "American Pastoral", and it was great to follow it up by reading Packer's book.

Like Packer, my father was an academic at an elite university, and as a traditional liberal who voted for Adlai, he was shocked by what he saw during the late 1960s. On a personal level, I liked reading a book by a writer who likes the same authors I like - Saul Bellow (Humboldt's Gift), Christopher Lasch, Irving Howe et al. There is a passage in which Packer perfectly summarizes the thesis of Lasch's "Revolt of the Elites" - gated communities like the ones that dot my hometown in Southern California.

The only area where I would fault Packer's book is that he does not criticize the dogmatic, politically correct tone that liberalism took on during the late 1980s and early 1990s and which still haunts liberalism. What alarmed Packer's father was exactly that, and I'm afraid Packer only devotes one paragraph to it. Left liberalism has, I'm afraid, taken on a neo-Stalinist quality on some college campuses, viz, stealing copies of conservative campus newspapers which take politically incorrect stands on such issues as affirmative action. Liberals should decry that just as much as the depredations of the Right. David Horowitz shouldn't be the only one who claims the moral high ground on that issue. I don't know if Packer's father would be a neoconservative today, but he might have been, if he'd lived.

Aside from all that, I commend Packer's book. It is a decent, humane and intelligent work that says that there's still a place at the political table for liberalism, even for disheartened liberals like me!

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Am I the Only One? A Colored Man's Review
I admire the liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt and company as much as the next person. I admire politicians who speak up for the common man. Read more
Published on December 15, 2006 by Lily Bart

5.0 out of 5 stars If you want to understand why liberals lose elections, read Packer
Blood of the Liberals is a near-perfect blend of the personal and the political. Packer's grandfather was George Huddleston, a Congressman from Birmingham, Alabama who represents... Read more
Published on October 6, 2006 by Stephen R. Laniel

5.0 out of 5 stars George Packer is a literary and historical genius!
Words can simply not do justice to the rapturous "Eureka! I have found it" feeling I experienced when I found, read and re-read this timely, vivid and insanely... Read more
Published on June 9, 2002 by Philip Hall

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard to read...harder to live

What a grand legacy was left to author George Parker by his father and grandfather.

This is not light or easy reading, but is worth your time because it gives you a real... Read more

Published on February 3, 2001 by Terry Mathews

5.0 out of 5 stars A liberal dose of liberalism's trials and tribulations....
Let me start by saying this is the kind of book that the reader will just fly through. The prose flows. The story is also compelling. Read more
Published on November 20, 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars Deeper than Blood
An extraordinarily intelligent detective story, in which the author/detective seeks both the history of his family and the meaning of democracy in the United States. Read more
Published on September 18, 2000 by Glenn Adelson

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   



So You'd Like to...

Create a guide

Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)


Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject

 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.