Blood of the Liberals, George Packer
Blood of the Liberals, George Packer
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Blood of the Liberals

Author: George Packer

Narrator: George Packer

Unabridged: 17 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/06/2018


Synopsis

An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history

George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century--an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely--and ultimately fatally--tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, this is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Clif on August 28, 2013

Remember Tina Turner telling us in Proud Mary that she was going to start out easy, but she was going to end rough? So it is with this book that has what starts as a routine history take fire. George Packer wonders about the father that he barely knew, who had a disabling stroke when George was a you......more

Goodreads review by Joseph on September 26, 2019

Not as good as some of Packer's later writing, but I none the less enjoyed this very personal mix of memoir and history. Packer traces back his family's political involvement and uses his father and grandfather to illustrate 2 very different versions of liberalism. His grandfather (a populist Alabam......more

Goodreads review by Geoff on February 11, 2010

The protagonist in the first half is acutally my great-grandfather by birth. It was not easy being a liberal in the deep south circa 19th century.......more

Goodreads review by Lois on October 17, 2020

Heartrending Sharing A mammoth sharing of both George Packer’s personal life and an in depth rendition of the political history of the times of his family of which he writes. Of great personal meaning to me and admiration of his talent as I had the good fortune to know his father when he was a young......more

Goodreads review by Rebecca on July 31, 2019

This is my second book by George Packer. The first was OUR MAN about Richard Holbrooke and written in the last few years. BLOOD OF THE LIBERALS was written in 2000. It is sort of an autobiography in that he is writing about the lives of his maternal grandfather and his father as well as himself. He......more