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Blood of the Liberals
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, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.
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, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.
416 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2000
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August 29, 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 young boy and who died not long after. He looks back into family history to see if he can establish a thread that will tell him something about America, his own family, and himself. That thread is liberalism - in him runs the blood of liberals.
There is a sharp break in this book dividing it into a history as any competent historian could construct it, and a personal account that only George Packer can relate. The difference between the two parts is profound and the break comes with this:
"Raised on Vietnam and Watergate and Saturday Night Live, how could we (he and his friends) take politics seriously? Compare this early political education to my grandfather's - southern defeat, rural poverty, farmers' and workers' revolts - or to my parents' - Depression, government activism, war against fascism - and you begin to see how badly prepared we were to be responsible. But the choice for every generation is ultimately between taking politics seriously and letting power and wealth go unchecked. Through junior high, high school and college, I enjoyed an ideological free ride through a scenery of billboard slogans and low amusements - until, ten years after my father's death, I decided to get off and see what lay behind the fun house."
It is at this point that the book moves from a three star read to a full five stars. Packer travels, works and lives with many different folks. His education in gritty reality and human behavior is gained at a homeless shelter, on carpentry jobs, as a Peace Corp worker in a rural African village, as an observer at the Promise Keepers demo in DC.
He says:
"It's not too hard to find a pattern in history, or in someone else's life, especially someone dead. But at ground level my own life and the times look like a random mess, pieces from ten different puzzles, a dozen stories started and interrupted without a middle or an ending. What holds it all together? What are the larger themes? Where is the trajectory leading? Why this road and not that? How can so many impulses and pursuits amount to anything as coherent as a story? How can I justify the way I've lived?"
Can't all of us relate to this existential crisis? It's fundamental to a thinking human being.
But Packer has social questions that drive him: how can people live together in a just way that recognizes each individual and doesn't direct wealth and power to the few? How can one take a stand politically for this? To what "party" should one ally? Capitalism is our way of life. It has swept the field of challengers, but without a challenger, how can it be brought to heel? Can anyone even think of an alternative? We watch helplessly as income inequality relentlessly increases, while all the solutions to the problem posed by liberals have been discredited.
Where are we to turn in a cynical age that scoffs at grand ideas and thinks anyone who speaks of the brotherhood of man is a fool?
The last third of this book is wonderful and it can be so because of the prologue of family and national history that allows the reader to deeply appreciate the questions that hound George Packer. He squirms to bring the puzzle together, producing a flood of insight that should cause every reader to ponder our situation.
The Blood of Liberals is a book that MUST be read in its entirety.
George Packer wonders about the father that he barely knew, who had a disabling stroke when George was a young boy and who died not long after. He looks back into family history to see if he can establish a thread that will tell him something about America, his own family, and himself. That thread is liberalism - in him runs the blood of liberals.
There is a sharp break in this book dividing it into a history as any competent historian could construct it, and a personal account that only George Packer can relate. The difference between the two parts is profound and the break comes with this:
"Raised on Vietnam and Watergate and Saturday Night Live, how could we (he and his friends) take politics seriously? Compare this early political education to my grandfather's - southern defeat, rural poverty, farmers' and workers' revolts - or to my parents' - Depression, government activism, war against fascism - and you begin to see how badly prepared we were to be responsible. But the choice for every generation is ultimately between taking politics seriously and letting power and wealth go unchecked. Through junior high, high school and college, I enjoyed an ideological free ride through a scenery of billboard slogans and low amusements - until, ten years after my father's death, I decided to get off and see what lay behind the fun house."
It is at this point that the book moves from a three star read to a full five stars. Packer travels, works and lives with many different folks. His education in gritty reality and human behavior is gained at a homeless shelter, on carpentry jobs, as a Peace Corp worker in a rural African village, as an observer at the Promise Keepers demo in DC.
He says:
"It's not too hard to find a pattern in history, or in someone else's life, especially someone dead. But at ground level my own life and the times look like a random mess, pieces from ten different puzzles, a dozen stories started and interrupted without a middle or an ending. What holds it all together? What are the larger themes? Where is the trajectory leading? Why this road and not that? How can so many impulses and pursuits amount to anything as coherent as a story? How can I justify the way I've lived?"
Can't all of us relate to this existential crisis? It's fundamental to a thinking human being.
But Packer has social questions that drive him: how can people live together in a just way that recognizes each individual and doesn't direct wealth and power to the few? How can one take a stand politically for this? To what "party" should one ally? Capitalism is our way of life. It has swept the field of challengers, but without a challenger, how can it be brought to heel? Can anyone even think of an alternative? We watch helplessly as income inequality relentlessly increases, while all the solutions to the problem posed by liberals have been discredited.
Where are we to turn in a cynical age that scoffs at grand ideas and thinks anyone who speaks of the brotherhood of man is a fool?
The last third of this book is wonderful and it can be so because of the prologue of family and national history that allows the reader to deeply appreciate the questions that hound George Packer. He squirms to bring the puzzle together, producing a flood of insight that should cause every reader to ponder our situation.
The Blood of Liberals is a book that MUST be read in its entirety.
January 12, 2015
This book was a terrible disappointment.
No author -- at least no non-fiction author -- should ever put "blood" in the title unless they really mean business. Unless they really intend to present true facts about the suffering of real people who made the ultimate sacrifice in a worthy cause.
That's not what this book is about at all. There are no heroes. There are no martyrs. There's just a whole lot of clamorous posturing and revisionist history. All of it as dry as dust, too.
Packer represents his grandfather as a "liberal" when he was just another Jim Crow segregationist. He sneers at the courageous military legacy of the Confederacy without ever coming to terms with the real ugliness of his own grandfather's moral failures.
In the midst of all this, there is no black perspective at all. In fact I get the impression that Packer actually resents the blacks of the Civil Rights era, because they took action on their own, led by their own, instead of being "inspired" by the enlightened atheist socialist liberals of his father's ilk. How very counter-revolutionary of them!
No author -- at least no non-fiction author -- should ever put "blood" in the title unless they really mean business. Unless they really intend to present true facts about the suffering of real people who made the ultimate sacrifice in a worthy cause.
That's not what this book is about at all. There are no heroes. There are no martyrs. There's just a whole lot of clamorous posturing and revisionist history. All of it as dry as dust, too.
Packer represents his grandfather as a "liberal" when he was just another Jim Crow segregationist. He sneers at the courageous military legacy of the Confederacy without ever coming to terms with the real ugliness of his own grandfather's moral failures.
In the midst of all this, there is no black perspective at all. In fact I get the impression that Packer actually resents the blacks of the Civil Rights era, because they took action on their own, led by their own, instead of being "inspired" by the enlightened atheist socialist liberals of his father's ilk. How very counter-revolutionary of them!
February 16, 2008
This is a really wonderful book about family, politics, generations of liberalism and what liberalism really means.
Lightly written, that is to say not ponderous or pretentious or dense.
Packer tells the story of his maternal branch of Southern Democrats and paternal branch of New York Jewish intelligentsia coming together into his own personal history....as well as, of course, the political history of American politics today.
You get the story of his struggles with his own personal family's history (his father cracked up under extreme conditions) as well his reaction to it: Packer's own early freakouts as a Democratic Socialist and a Peace Corps volunteer.
It's all wrapped up in exactly what today's political situation is like. Essential reading for grasping the current milieu.
And then we went into Baghdad......And Packer nailed that one. GO READ THE ASSASSIN'S GATE!!!
I'm serious people....history in the fucking making!!!
November 16, 2025
George Packer’s Blood of the Liberals is an unusually personal blend of memoir, political history, cultural argument and mediation of the long arc of American Liberalism. Packer undertakes a journey across generations of his own lineage, not merely to recount their stories but to measure the distance between the liberal faith they cherished and the anxious, fractured America into which he himself was born.
The first strand of the book focuses on Webb’s maternal grandfather, a classic turn-of-the-century Southern progressive. This man, a staunch believer in public education, civic institutions, and economic fairness, embodies the high-minded, reformist liberalism of the Progressive Era. His grandfather, the Thomas Jefferson democrat that he was, believed that reason and reform could lift the nation through the tumultuous times of the late 19th century. With the backdrop of Agrarian Populism, Packer’s grandfather represented the shining light of American liberalism; he held strong convictions with his belief in public duty, in the perfectibility of institutions, and in the steady improvement of mankind.
The author then turns from the lofty heights of his grandfather’s world to the more rugged, impassioned landscape of his father’s—and ultimately, to his own. Here he encounters a very different America: suburban, anxious, divided, and beset by forces his grandfather’s generation could scarcely have imagined. The educated middle class to which his family belonged became both the beneficiary of liberalism and its uneasy critic, torn between its early confidence in institutions and its later, more chastened understanding of power. Packer argues that argues that by the late 20th century, American liberalism had fractured into two warring sensibilities: an older, communitarian liberalism rooted in shared duty, and a newer, more technocratic liberalism emphasizing expertise, bureaucracy, and identity. He contends that liberal elites lost their ability to speak to people whose identities were forged in factories, military service, or rural hardship, leaving them vulnerable to conservative populism.
This is the heart of Packer’s argument. liberalism, a creed once rooted in solidarity and civic uplift, gradually lost its foothold among ordinary Americans. He writes of a movement that drifted toward technocracy, away from the everyday struggles of workers and toward an allegiance with managers, experts, and professional elites. In this retreat.
Packer’s father was a professor at Stanford University and he uses the history of the institution as a vivid symbol of how American liberalism drifted from its democratic, reform-minded roots into a meritocratic, technocratic elite that became increasingly detached from the broader society it meant to uplift. He describes the university’s evolution, from a place shaped by public-spirited ambition and middle-class aspiration into a hub of wealth, hyper-competition, and professionalized liberal ideology, as mirroring the larger transformation of the liberal class. Stanford’s shift reflects how liberal institutions embraced individual achievement, expertise, and market logic at the expense of solidarity and shared civic purpose. This evolution ties directly to one of the book’s central themes: the estrangement between liberal elites and ordinary Americans. As Stanford and similar institutions became engines of opportunity for a narrow, highly credentialed cohort, the older liberal promise of broad-based economic and social uplift weakened. For Packer, Stanford is not just a university but a microcosm of the modern liberal project.
I thought this was a really interesting book and well worth the read. Stylistically, Packer’s prose is measured, forceful, and unflinching. He writes a political history of 100 years through his families personal stories and struggles.
The first strand of the book focuses on Webb’s maternal grandfather, a classic turn-of-the-century Southern progressive. This man, a staunch believer in public education, civic institutions, and economic fairness, embodies the high-minded, reformist liberalism of the Progressive Era. His grandfather, the Thomas Jefferson democrat that he was, believed that reason and reform could lift the nation through the tumultuous times of the late 19th century. With the backdrop of Agrarian Populism, Packer’s grandfather represented the shining light of American liberalism; he held strong convictions with his belief in public duty, in the perfectibility of institutions, and in the steady improvement of mankind.
The author then turns from the lofty heights of his grandfather’s world to the more rugged, impassioned landscape of his father’s—and ultimately, to his own. Here he encounters a very different America: suburban, anxious, divided, and beset by forces his grandfather’s generation could scarcely have imagined. The educated middle class to which his family belonged became both the beneficiary of liberalism and its uneasy critic, torn between its early confidence in institutions and its later, more chastened understanding of power. Packer argues that argues that by the late 20th century, American liberalism had fractured into two warring sensibilities: an older, communitarian liberalism rooted in shared duty, and a newer, more technocratic liberalism emphasizing expertise, bureaucracy, and identity. He contends that liberal elites lost their ability to speak to people whose identities were forged in factories, military service, or rural hardship, leaving them vulnerable to conservative populism.
This is the heart of Packer’s argument. liberalism, a creed once rooted in solidarity and civic uplift, gradually lost its foothold among ordinary Americans. He writes of a movement that drifted toward technocracy, away from the everyday struggles of workers and toward an allegiance with managers, experts, and professional elites. In this retreat.
Packer’s father was a professor at Stanford University and he uses the history of the institution as a vivid symbol of how American liberalism drifted from its democratic, reform-minded roots into a meritocratic, technocratic elite that became increasingly detached from the broader society it meant to uplift. He describes the university’s evolution, from a place shaped by public-spirited ambition and middle-class aspiration into a hub of wealth, hyper-competition, and professionalized liberal ideology, as mirroring the larger transformation of the liberal class. Stanford’s shift reflects how liberal institutions embraced individual achievement, expertise, and market logic at the expense of solidarity and shared civic purpose. This evolution ties directly to one of the book’s central themes: the estrangement between liberal elites and ordinary Americans. As Stanford and similar institutions became engines of opportunity for a narrow, highly credentialed cohort, the older liberal promise of broad-based economic and social uplift weakened. For Packer, Stanford is not just a university but a microcosm of the modern liberal project.
I thought this was a really interesting book and well worth the read. Stylistically, Packer’s prose is measured, forceful, and unflinching. He writes a political history of 100 years through his families personal stories and struggles.
September 27, 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 Alabama Democratic Congressman) was a Jeffersonian individualist and social leveler who believed that economic inequality was a threat to the republic but opposed government intervention to change this (hence his opposition to the New Deal). His father was the classic over-educated, institutional liberal (a college professor and administrator) who clashed mainly with more radical students who saw him as the new establishment. Packer finds himself inheriting numerous conflicting strands, and the end of the book is a compelling account of his journey to find a political and ethical identity in his 20s and 30. Overall this book is a great blend of personal and political ideas and memories that represents an early Packer-ite attempt to defend a certain type of individualism.
February 12, 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.
October 18, 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 lawyer at Cox, Langford, Stoddard & Cutler. So many thanks. With deep appreciation of great talent enjoyed now in George’s latest writings in the Atlantic.
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 lawyer at Cox, Langford, Stoddard & Cutler. So many thanks. With deep appreciation of great talent enjoyed now in George’s latest writings in the Atlantic.
January 23, 2016
Yeah...no. I loved George Packer's recent book The Unwinding, so I thought I'd give this one a shot. Packer is a good writer, but I only got about 70 pages in before I realized that I just didn't give a shit. This book is a history of his family's devotion to liberalism, spanning from the Progressive Era to about 2000. Whatever.
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 says of the 3 generations: "The industrial struggles of the early 20th Century gave my grandfather's generation the social psychology of the crusader, prone to great, oversimplifying passions. Depression and war made my parents' generation pragmatic and repressed. But the generation that came of age in the aftermath of the 60's has acquired a psychology of defensive contempt and free-floating anxiety."
His grandfather served in Congress from Birmingham, Alabama while his father was a law professor at Stanford University during the 60's student unrest. His grandfather was defeated when he couldn't support the New Deal due to his belief in state's rights. He would live to be 90 but died six months before Packer was born. Packer was named after him. His father ended up committing suicide after suffering a stroke due to dealing with the issues at Stanford.
Packer, himself, struggled with his liberal/Progressive background. He went to Africa with the Peace Corps, worked in a homeless shelter and briefly got involved with evangelical religious groups. Fortunately for us he found that being a writer worked best for him. I am hoping to read more of his books. He has a lot to say about history and in this book about US political history.
Again his comparison with his parents: "Raised on Vietnam and Watergate and Saturday Night Live, how could we take politics seriously? Compare this early political education to my grandfather's--southern defeat, rural poverty, farmers' and workers' revolt---or to my parents'--Depression, government activism, war against fascism--and you begin to see how badly prepared we were to be responsible. But the choice for every generation is ultimately between taking politics seriously and letting power and wealth go unchecked." In our inattention we have elected a wealthy businessman intent on power 16 years after Packer writes this.
He says of the Bill Clinton decade "it has made private life sovereign for a generation that never had a collective experience of civic engagement. In what way are we citizens?" He is speaking of the generation who didn't have to face the draft and serve in the military or march in antiwar demonstrations. "This was the face of American prosperity at the end of the century; racially tolerant, environmentally conscious, and determined to WALL itself off from the low-paid countrymen who cut its grass and wait on its tables and look after its children." Wall is the pertinent word here. He means the gated communities but essentially that is what Trump wants to do---make the whole country a gated community except, of course, we still don't have robots to do all of those "low-paid" jobs.
"When private life goes, you're left with Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. When public life wastes away, you get Clinton's America. Maybe the job of politics now is to manage our hard-won freedom and prosperity. For that, we won't need visionaries but technicians." Right now it is the technicians (the bureaucrats and civil servants) who are running the country because we have NO leaders. Computers in the way of phones is where all our attention goes these days.
"Beneath the surface complacency of the soaring Dow and the plummeting crime rate, it feels like a time of fragile confidence, rattled whenever some alienated schoolboy or angry loner with an automatic shoots up a playground or office building. The main forces shaping our national life don't appear to be under any rational control. Chronic underlying ills go untreated because no serious government policy or aroused citizen's movement exists to address them." We have NO leaders as noted above and we can't agree or don't know how to be citizens who join together to get things done. We have lost our ability to communicate, to believe in good, to believe that we can overcome the malaise that exists and the fear that we aren't capable of making changes. We are waiting for Holden Caulfield to come along and stop us from walking over the cliff.
"If liberalism implies faith that people can be better than they are, conservatism often springs from a wound as personal and damaging as domestic humiliation...the relationship between politics and home is impossible to pin down and impossible to ignore." "The Klan would become the Republican view and eventually the popular view." Are the homes and families of America so unhappy and disturbed that they no longer believe in the better side of humans?
His grandfather served in Congress from Birmingham, Alabama while his father was a law professor at Stanford University during the 60's student unrest. His grandfather was defeated when he couldn't support the New Deal due to his belief in state's rights. He would live to be 90 but died six months before Packer was born. Packer was named after him. His father ended up committing suicide after suffering a stroke due to dealing with the issues at Stanford.
Packer, himself, struggled with his liberal/Progressive background. He went to Africa with the Peace Corps, worked in a homeless shelter and briefly got involved with evangelical religious groups. Fortunately for us he found that being a writer worked best for him. I am hoping to read more of his books. He has a lot to say about history and in this book about US political history.
Again his comparison with his parents: "Raised on Vietnam and Watergate and Saturday Night Live, how could we take politics seriously? Compare this early political education to my grandfather's--southern defeat, rural poverty, farmers' and workers' revolt---or to my parents'--Depression, government activism, war against fascism--and you begin to see how badly prepared we were to be responsible. But the choice for every generation is ultimately between taking politics seriously and letting power and wealth go unchecked." In our inattention we have elected a wealthy businessman intent on power 16 years after Packer writes this.
He says of the Bill Clinton decade "it has made private life sovereign for a generation that never had a collective experience of civic engagement. In what way are we citizens?" He is speaking of the generation who didn't have to face the draft and serve in the military or march in antiwar demonstrations. "This was the face of American prosperity at the end of the century; racially tolerant, environmentally conscious, and determined to WALL itself off from the low-paid countrymen who cut its grass and wait on its tables and look after its children." Wall is the pertinent word here. He means the gated communities but essentially that is what Trump wants to do---make the whole country a gated community except, of course, we still don't have robots to do all of those "low-paid" jobs.
"When private life goes, you're left with Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. When public life wastes away, you get Clinton's America. Maybe the job of politics now is to manage our hard-won freedom and prosperity. For that, we won't need visionaries but technicians." Right now it is the technicians (the bureaucrats and civil servants) who are running the country because we have NO leaders. Computers in the way of phones is where all our attention goes these days.
"Beneath the surface complacency of the soaring Dow and the plummeting crime rate, it feels like a time of fragile confidence, rattled whenever some alienated schoolboy or angry loner with an automatic shoots up a playground or office building. The main forces shaping our national life don't appear to be under any rational control. Chronic underlying ills go untreated because no serious government policy or aroused citizen's movement exists to address them." We have NO leaders as noted above and we can't agree or don't know how to be citizens who join together to get things done. We have lost our ability to communicate, to believe in good, to believe that we can overcome the malaise that exists and the fear that we aren't capable of making changes. We are waiting for Holden Caulfield to come along and stop us from walking over the cliff.
"If liberalism implies faith that people can be better than they are, conservatism often springs from a wound as personal and damaging as domestic humiliation...the relationship between politics and home is impossible to pin down and impossible to ignore." "The Klan would become the Republican view and eventually the popular view." Are the homes and families of America so unhappy and disturbed that they no longer believe in the better side of humans?
August 31, 2018
A look at the history of liberalism in America from a personal perspective and what needs to be done to revive it in the 21st Century.
November 29, 2021
Insightful, courageous, and well-told. A tour de force.
May 13, 2015
I’m a big Packer fan, ever since I started reading his articles in The New Yorker and his book, Assassin’s Gate about Iraq war. The Blood of Liberals doesn't disappoint. Part history, part family memoir, it’s the story about the development of contemporary liberalism as we know it today has traced through Packer’s maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, his father, Herbert Packer and his own ideological journey. Each of the periods takes up approximately one-third of the book, but the most interesting for me was the last third in which Packer traces the development of his own political perspective.
This book is not a dry philosophical tract. While all three of the main characters, Packer, grandfather and father, are familiar their liberal forefathers, including Jefferson, John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson, to name a few, their politics reflect their experiences and times. Moreover, the description of their political development is not presented in isolation from their personal lives. While Packer does not subscribe to the notion that the personal is always political, he doesn't ignore the how the personal (and personality) affects one's politics.
For me the most interesting section was the last third, when GP writes about how his own views were shaped by his family and his own experiences. He grew up in a very liberal household, but unlike others who grew up in a similar environment, he was repulsed by the extreme radicalism of the late 1960s. Perhaps it had to do with his age, he was born in 1961, too young to participate in the new left, and I’m sure a lot of it had to do with how the campus protests affected his father, which probably contributed to his stroke and eventually his suicide.
This book is not a dry philosophical tract. While all three of the main characters, Packer, grandfather and father, are familiar their liberal forefathers, including Jefferson, John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson, to name a few, their politics reflect their experiences and times. Moreover, the description of their political development is not presented in isolation from their personal lives. While Packer does not subscribe to the notion that the personal is always political, he doesn't ignore the how the personal (and personality) affects one's politics.
For me the most interesting section was the last third, when GP writes about how his own views were shaped by his family and his own experiences. He grew up in a very liberal household, but unlike others who grew up in a similar environment, he was repulsed by the extreme radicalism of the late 1960s. Perhaps it had to do with his age, he was born in 1961, too young to participate in the new left, and I’m sure a lot of it had to do with how the campus protests affected his father, which probably contributed to his stroke and eventually his suicide.
July 17, 2008
I'm hoping to go back and re-read this one at some point, though it certainly isn't something one can breeze through. I love how the author blends the history of the liberal political movement in this country with his own family's political and personal history. I also related to his stories of trying to figure out his own beliefs, both politically and spiritually. His account of losing his father is truly touching. I am still hoping to check out more of George Packer's books in the near future.
September 1, 2016
This is a very well written history of the Packer family. Author's grandfather on his mom's side of the family was a Populist Southern Baptist from Birmingham, AL who served as a Congressman in the House of Representatives. His father was a Jewish son of immigrants who became a Stanford professor in the 1960's. The author included his own political development.
I felt I leaned new ideas as well as evaluating old ideas. The book inspired my hopes for continuation of liberal, populist-progressive ideas in the United States which has become so conservative lately.
I felt I leaned new ideas as well as evaluating old ideas. The book inspired my hopes for continuation of liberal, populist-progressive ideas in the United States which has become so conservative lately.
June 10, 2008
A powerful account of the political and personal examining (and empathizing with) successive generations caught on the wrong side of history by their adherence to principle. In recognizing both past liberal achievements and the potential for future projects it's a inspiration to cure disaffection.
May 17, 2007
Perhaps the best book I have ever read. A fascinating story that tells about George Packer's family history and the rise and fall of American liberalism and reform movements. Pick it up...now!
February 27, 2008
I gave this to my family.
October 8, 2014
Packer reviews the last century or so of liberalism through the biographies of his father and grandfather.
October 10, 2016
Good read. Memoir/political history
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews