Essays on Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bertrand Russell, Aung San Suu Kyi & Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

by Bob Blaisdell

Inexpensive but substantial, this anthology ranges from Henry David Thoreau's great nineteenth-century polemics "Civil Disobedience" and "Slavery in Massachusetts" to more recent writings by Aung San Suu Kyi as well as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of the subversive Russian rock group Pussy Riot.
Additional selections include Leo Tolstoy's denouncement of capital punishment, "I Cannot Be Silent"; Bertrand Russell's "Civil Disobedience and the Threat of Nuclear Warfare"; and "Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience" and "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr. Other contributors include William Lloyd Garrison, Albert Einstein, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Editor Bob Blaisdell provides an informative Introduction.

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2015

About the author

Bob Blaisdell is a published adapter, author, editor, and an illustrator of children's books and young adult books. He teaches English in Brooklyn at Kingsborough Community College. He is a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and Christian Science Monitor and the editor of more than three dozen anthologies for Dover Publications. Email him at Robert.Blaisdell@Kingsborough.edu

Reviews

[Drick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not finish. This collection of essays are "classics" in thinking about civil disobedience, but really need context for understanding their significance in their time. Each essay had a brief historical note, but not enough to really help unpack its significance. It would be a good resource along side a history of civil disobedience but by itself its value is limited.

[Johan · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the subject is interesting and this collection consists of essays from authors all over the history, From Henry David Thoreau to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King jr to Albert Einstein to Leo Tolstoy to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, I can't say I really learned anything new.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great overview collection on civil disobedience and was quite helpful to me in getting an intro in the basic concepts and ideas. I read this collection backwards as I found the most recent essays easier to get I to, and thus found myself slowly reading further into the past the roots of civil disobedience and was able to see its connections to Christianity. Is this collection all I will need regarding this topic? Almost certainly not. But I'm grateful for the lessons and ideas it has taught me. It is also nice to see such a wide variety of different opinions and perspectives from these authors and that they do not simply parrot each other.