Amazon.com: Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century: Gerry Spence: Books

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"We are slaves. All of us," writes Wyoming superlawyer Gerry Spence with his trademark exuberance. "The New Master is an entanglement of megacorporations on the one hand and an omnipresent national government on the other, each stuck to the other like a pair of copulating dogs, each unable to move without dragging the other behind it, each dependent upon the other, hating the other, but welded to the other in a dissolute enterprise."

This decidedly offbeat manifesto will make Spence--who comes across as a left-leaning Ross Perot on steroids--friends and enemies at every point along the political spectrum. Among his tamer suggestions are a call to criminalize campaign contributions, forced voting for all citizens, and the drafting of judges for temporary assignment from a pool of trial lawyers. In case these ideas don't go far enough, Spence also wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Liberal populists will cheer Give Me Liberty! for its unremitting audacity; conservatives will chafe at Spence's fundamental radicalism. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly
Lawyer, writer and television pundit Spence starts his scathing critique of American society with Goethe's famous statement, "No one is as hopelessly enslaved as the person who thinks he is free." This is a wide-ranging polemic but at its heart it reflects Spence's claim that Americans of all walks of life have been enslaved by the New Master, "the sum total of an amoral coupling between government and business." Anticipating criticism, Spence (How to Argue and Win Every Time) suggests that while the lives of African American slaves were obviously worse than those of what he deems contemporary corporate slaves, "a comparison is in order." Despite the tactlessness of this approach, Spence does offer a refreshing condemnation of Americans' obsession with work and the accruing of wealth. Many other of his subjects, however, have been covered often and are simply given a fresh gloss through Spence's slave metaphor. His "Twenty Childish Questions," for example, range from why America cannot educate its young to why imprisonment rates have risen exponentially. Spence never hesitates to depart from the highway of his argument for an interesting side road; while the force of his homespun rhetoric makes for an entertaining read, these deviations detract from the book's focus. The ability to raise important social questions and attack rampant complacency while simultaneously recalling Ruby Ridge and Waco reveal Spence as an unlikely cross between a progressive lawyer and a Western populist.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

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