.... I'm always one to like books like "Power Quotes", they are always interesting, and let me tell you something....this book has them all and nicley cross referenced too. It has helped me out already on the first day I got them with my reports.....If I could tell you one thing, it would be to buy this book, it will help you a lot, I think I might go read some more so I'd better go....Bye now.

Michel Foucault admitted in an interview that his writings were works of fiction, yet had a certain truth about them. Nikolas Rose's 'Powers of Freedom' is far less of a fiction that anything of Foucault's, but it is similarly a search for truth. I much prefer to read Foucault, though if you are a Foucault fan you won't be disappointed with Rose. He indeed builds on Foucault's ideas. And where Foucauld tends towards nihilism and depression, Rose keeps up a spirit of optimism and hope. Both advise using thought as a weapon in the never-ending battle against those who purport to rule us in our own name and for our own good.

There are many interesting ideas in 'Powers of Freedom'. I suppose the main one is that freedom is an invention of modern government. Before the modern age there was no such thing as freedom - one lived in fear of violence and intimidation from above and below. Only with the advent of the modern age with its mores of civility and self-control has sovereign power felt able to let its subjects reasonably alone.

Another idea, according to Rose, is that individuality is both an invention and a subjectivity. He develops Foucault's notion of a personal ethics and argues that our current 'wars of subjectivity' emerge around the concept that 'individuals can shape an autonomous identity through choices in taste, music, goods, styles and habitus outside the control of coherent discourses of civility or the technologies of political government. The politics of conduct is faced with a new set of problems: governing subject formation in this new plural field.' (page 179).

In this volume, John Cobin persuasively illustrates that the pro-life position is essentially liberal, from both economic and philosophical perspectives. The exposition is clear and simple and the many appendices make this work suitable for use in the classroom as well. Dr. Cobin was instrumental in refining my thinking on this subject and his book is highly recommended.

"Weak governments do not make libery and property secure; that is the office of powerful governments internally restrained." - Clarence Carson.

In my humble opinion, Clarence Carson is the best intellectual historian of the United States, even though his simple style and gift for essentialization may make him appear less "serious" than the more scholarly authors who love to dazzle their restricted readership with an abundance of notes, sources, dates, statistics and minutely detailed anecdotes, but who tend to get all the crucial conclusions wrong.

Carson is a rare, reality-oriented historian who gets virtually all of his fundamentals right, from political philosophy to economics. And even when he errs - as when his deeply held religious beliefs make him disparage man's creative abilities or when he reads a Platonic dualism in the Declaration of Independence - his errors have a way of remaining localized, leaving the flow of his arguments uncorrupted.

Just as importantly, he is able to give you the substance of past thinkers without any distortion or gross misrepresentation, refusing for instance to label the US form of government a "democracy" ("the democratic features of the American political system are accidents... [Its] essence... is limited government" pp257-8) and providing a clear and accurate knowledge of the original intent of the Founders that puts to shame the more in-depth and usually more myopic scholarly studies.

Published in 1973, *The Rebirth of Liberty: the American Republic 1760-1800* covers about the same ground as the first volume and part of the second volume of Carson's *Basic History of the United States*, or section II of his *Basic American Government*, though with a more chronological approach. It deals with the influence of the English heritage, the colonial experience and the Enlightenment on the political ideas of the Founders; chronicles the failures of Great Britain's mercantilism and the consequent acts of rebellion of the colonies, culminating in the winning of the War of Independence; and finally moves on to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the ratification debates and the adoption of the Bill of Rights, ending with two short chapters on the important political decisions made during the first few presidencies, and slightly overstepping the bounds of the subtitle with such court decisions as Marbury vs. Madison and Fletcher vs. Peck.

Though he is at his most penetrating when dealing with intellectual history and tends to prove less brilliant and original as soon as he stoops to the more factual levels, Carson delivers here an excellent account of the founding of the US government which provides the reader with the essential context for understanding the beliefs and intentions of its creators- an effort that is all the more laudable as those beliefs and intentions have been drowned in the liberal misinterpretations of the twentieth century.

The book is complemented by 60 pages of landmark documents, from the Declaration of the Stamp Act Congress to Jefferson's Inaugural Address.

As its modest dimensions would suggest, Witte's book is meant to be a quick overview of judicial attitudes towards religious freedom in the United States, instead of a comprehensive history. The author does a marvelous job of consolidating the varied factors that have gone into the current stare decisis in First Amendment religion jurisprudence. Witte has a very readable style, and this book would hold the interest of the casual reader while serving quite well as a text book for classes on the subject.

Moorcock is first and foremost a master
fantasist and one of the bold crew who dragged
golden age SF kicking and screaming into the
New World. But here there is a glimpse of
a different man. Here you will find the writer
expressing some of his deepest held personal
and (perforce) political beliefs. This
extended argument, written in the midst of
Thatcher's Britain focuses on the author's
concern for his society's implacable retreat
from those liberties that once seemed so
important to Britain in it's recent history.
As he builds his argument, step by step he
challenges the encroachement of the New Moral
Right's assault on the Liberalisation of
modern society and requires us to take our
positions, on one side of the line or the
other. This work is a stern antidote for the
backlash but it also challenges those who
would espouse liberal or even radical
positions to the detriment of the essence of
human liberty. Most strikingly, in his final
discourse on pornography and censorship
Moorcock's challenge is clear - repressive
social action, no matter how liberal or
enlightened it's motivation, is tyranny. A
thought provoking work, which may not win
instant converts to his thesis but will
surely engender critical reflection on
the reader's understanding of Liberty and
it's place in the modern world

Hatamiya has put together a book that is educational but doesn't skimp on the passion. It's an analysis of the factors that came together that led to passage of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act which apologized to the Japanese Americans who were interned during WWII. Besides an official letter of apology from the President, every surviving internee received a $20,000 payment. The payment was meaningless in terms of the freedoms taken away (not to mention businesses and real financial losses), but of great symbolic importance. Hatamiya examines the crucial question of how, with a conservative President and a time of economic down turn (the latter half of Reagan's second term, leading into Bush's Administration), did a bill which led to payments of $20,000 to a special segment of the population could be passed. Hatamiya also draws out the various factions among Japanese Americans who disagreed over tactics to win redress, as well as the various communities (Asian Americans more widely, WWII veterans, US Senate and Congress) who stood on either side of the debate.

The book is also a good introduction into the personal side of legislation and lawmaking, how and why representatives do what they do. I use it for a class on Asian/Pacific American legal issues and the book is great both for its subject matter as well as its general analysis of factors involved in successful legislation. Japanese Internment is not just a Japanese American, or even an Asian American issue. The fundamental injustices involved in the relocation of loyal citizens for no other reason than skin color is a vivid lesson that our Constitutional freedoms are not protected by the document itself, but by the sentiment and agreement of all the people who live under it. This is a necessary object lesson for all Americans.

In the post Romer vs. Evans era (1996) this book is out-dated. The authors are experts in their fields. But the material needs up-dating. The ACLU is highly respectable as defenders of gay rights.

This is a stunning collection of poetry presented in a bi-lingual layout that provides an extremely moving and spiritual diary of a poet that witness and survived the savagery of the Pol Pot years. What is more interesting is that the author U Sam Oeur has stretched the traditional and very formal structure of Khmer poetry and brought his own love and admiration of Walt Whitman to create a new kind of Cambodian poetry. I had the fortune of attending a reading by U Sam. His translator, Ken McCullough read the english translation which was followed by the author's sung and chanted rendition of the poem in Khmer. The author told us that when his family was finally able to return to their home in Phnom Penh, while everything else had remained, his entire library of some 2,000 books had been removed and apparently destroyed. The only thing that he discovered from his collection was a single page from a book of poems by Emily Dickinson.

I read this book for a government project. It gives ironic stories of government mess-ups. The government has put itself in between a rock and a hard place when it comes to certain acts and laws. Such self-entrapments are:doctors that sue for losing their jobs because they have hepatitis and under the laws, they have the right to claim disability. This book is a quick read and does not seem to give very many sources.