Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is... (more)

The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Vintage)

The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Vintage)

by Diane Ravitch

If you’re an actress or a coed just trying to do a man-size job , a yes-man who turns a deaf ear to some sob sister , an heiress aboard her yacht , or a bookworm enjoying a boy’s night out , Diane Ravitch’s internationally acclaimed The Language Police has bad news for you: Erase those words from your vocabulary! Textbook publishers and state education agencies have sought to root out racist,... (more)

Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism

Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism

by Geoffrey R. Stone

"A masterpiece of constitutional history, Perilous Times promises to redefine the national debate on civil liberties and free speech."—Elena Kagan, Harvard Law School Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times incisively investigates how the First Amendment and other civil liberties have been compromised in America during wartime. Stone delineates the consistent suppression of free speech in six historical periods... (more)

Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (Vintage)

Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (Vintage)

by Anthony Lewis

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gideon's Trumpet follows the progress of the 1960 libel suit that pitted The New York Times against a Montgomery, Alabama, city official, and whose settlement in the Supreme Court redefined what newspapers, and ordinary citizens, can print or say.

Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era

Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era

While freedom of speech has been guaranteed us for centuries, the First Amendment as we know it today is largely a creation of the past eighty years. Eternally Vigilant brings together a group of distinguished legal scholars to reflect boldly on its past, its present shape, and what forms our understanding of it might take in the future. Contributors: Lillian R. BeVier Vincent Blasi Lee C. Bollinger Stanley... (more)

Fahrenheit 451

A Novel

by Ray Bradbury

Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do....

Freethinkers: A History Of American Secularism

Freethinkers: A History Of American Secularism

by Susan Jacoby

At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby paints a striking portrait of more than two hundred years of secularist... (more)

The War on the Bill of Rights-and the Gathering Resistance

The War on the Bill of Rights-and the Gathering Resistance

by Nat Hentoff

"Hentoff's concise, remarkably comprehensive and highly readable book will be distressingly informative for many."- Los Angeles Times "Eloquent . . . Hentoff has written a deft primer that forcefully makes the civil libertarian's case against the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies. . . . The book is a call-to-arms for citizens to fight back and defend their liberties."- The Washington Post "Anyone... (more)

Trial of Socrates

by Irving Stone

In unraveling the long-hidden issues in the most famous free speech case of all time, Stone ranges far and wide over Roman as well as Greek civilization and gives us an engaging and rewarding introduction to classical antiquity and its relevance to our society today.

Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment

Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment

by Dorothea Lange

Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga. This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army—the majority of which have never been published— Impounded ... (more)

All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone

All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone

by Myra MacPherson

Boasting equal parts scholarship and style, "All Governments Lie" is a highly readable, groundbreaking, and timely look at I. F. Stone -- one of America's most independent and revered journalists, whose work carries the same immediacy it did almost a half century ago, highlighting the ever-present need for dissenting voices. In the world of Washington political journalism, notorious for trading independence for... (more)

Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie

Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie

by Leonard W. Levy

A legal historian reviews the history of blasphemy, from Moses to Rushdie, showing what forms of speech societies have found intolerable, tracing the changing meanings of blasphemy, and discussing the costs and benefits of free speech.

When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate (Landmark Law Cases & American Society)

When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate (Landmark Law Cases & American Society)

by Philippa Strum

In the Chicago suburb of Skokie, one out of every six Jewish citizens in the late 1970s was a survivor--or was directly related to a survivor--of the Holocaust. These victims of terror had resettled in America expecting to lead peaceful lives free from persecution. But their safe haven was shattered when a neo-Nazi group announced its intention to parade there in 1977. Philippa Strum's dramatic retelling of the... (more)

Censored Books II: Critical Viewpoints, 1985-2000

Censored Books II: Critical Viewpoints, 1985-2000

by Nat Hentoff

Beautifully reasoned arguments support the teaching of books that are frequently challenged by would-be censors. Author Karolides has chosen a wide range of literature, from the contemporary bestselling Harry Potter books to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Some books are challenged in the name of political correctness; others because of concern over violent or sexual content. The rationales, written by authors... (more)

Summer for the Gods

The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion

by Edward J. Larson

Reissued with a new preface: the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that is "quite simply the best book ever written on the Scopes Trial and its place in American history and myth." In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the 20th century's most contentious dramas: the Scopes trial that pit William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher... (more)

Best of I.f. Stone

by Karl Weber

Izzy Stone was a reporter, a radical, an idealist, a scholar and, it is clear, a writer whose insights have more than stood the test of time. More than fifteen years after his death, this collection of his work from I.F. Stone's Weekly and elsewhere is astonishing in its relevance to our age, addressing the clash between national security and individual liberty, the protection of minorities, economic... (more)

The First Freedom: A Tumultuous History of Free Speech in AmericaNat Hentoff

The First Freedom: A Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America

by Nat Hentoff

Cases and Controversies: Civil Rights and Liberties in Context

Cases and Controversies: Civil Rights and Liberties in Context

by Peter H. Irons

This casebook—containing longer excerpts than those found in most other books— includes cases from important Supreme Court opinions and material that places these cases and the issues they raise in a broad political, historical, and social context. The volume presents Supreme Court challenges and land mark decisions involving wartime protest and hysteria; the Great Depression; and conflicts over issues such as... (more)

100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature

100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature

by Dawn B. Sova, Nicholas J. Karolides

Throughout history, writers have had their works of literature and social, political, and religious thought censored in the United States and around the world. 100 Banned Books profiles 25 well-known, often classic works in each of these categories that have especially significant censorship histories. Each clearly written entry in this eye-opening book gives readers a summary of the work, its censorship history,... (more)

The First Casualty From the Crimea to Vietnam:The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth MakerPhillip Knightley

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: free speech-free press

by Harry G. Frankfurt

by Diane Ravitch

by Geoffrey R. Stone

by Anthony Lewis

A Novel

by Ray Bradbury

by Susan Jacoby

by Nat Hentoff

by Irving Stone

by Dorothea Lange

by Myra MacPherson

by Leonard W. Levy

by Philippa Strum

by Nat Hentoff

The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion

by Edward J. Larson

by Karl Weber

by Nat Hentoff

by Peter H. Irons

by Dawn B. Sova, Nicholas J. Karolides

by Phillip Knightley