Customer Reviews

New Options for America: The Second American Experiment has Begun

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This is a selection of the best cover stories from my old, idealistic, counter-cultural newsletter, New Options (1983-92, R.I.P.). They are personal in tone and very passionate. New Options started from scratch and built itself up into the second largest independent political newsletter in the U.S. with no funding from foundations or rich people. It eventually won Utne Reader's first "Alternative Press Award for General Excellence: Best Publication from 10,000 to 30,000 Circulation" and made the Washington Post's chart of 12 periodicals spearheading the "Ideology Shuffle."

Soon after this book was released I went to law school and became more "radical middle" in outlook; see my book Radical Middle (2004) elsewhere on this site. Radical Middle may be a more relevant book for the 21st century than New Options for America. It is almost as personal in tone, and a lot more analytic and well-informed. But sometimes I miss the sweet, eternally hopeful person I was in the 1970s and 1980s and the dreams that the idealistic fragment of my generation carried around with it. And when that happens, all I have to do is open this book and I'm right back in the middle of it again -- "Small, Organic Farms Can Solve the Farm Crisis"; "Drugs Are Not the Enemy"; "Siding With the World's Poor"; "Some of Our Daughters, Some of our Lovers" (about prostitutes); "You Don't Have To Be a Baby To Cry" (about the very early daze of the U.S. Green Party). . . . It was fun being young and hyper-idealistic until age 45. If I didn't also care about the real world, I might have stayed that way forever.

Although this is a dated volume that deserves a publisher's reprint with the author's update, Satin comes quite far here from where he started with his prior book "New Age Politics". Satin has a real eye for what makes thhe culture and polity tick -- and he uses that sixth sense to get at what ails our collective governance of ourselves and each other. By taking an apporach which gets beyond left and right and which "creates new options", and by focusing on what works in the real world (using real life examples of politcal and social action that is often unnoticed but still effective) Satin does us all a great service here. He helps to highlight what's been missing from the political scense for so long, and then lays out contcrete remedies. Good swtuff.