Books like True American by Anand Giridharadas
Days after 9/11, an avowed "American terrorist" named Mark Stroman, seeking revenge, walked into the Dallas minimart where Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a former Bangladesh Air Force officer, has found temporary work and shoots him, nearly killing him. Giridharadas traces the making of these two men, Stroman and Bhuiyan, and of their fateful encounter, following them as they rebuild shattered lives. Ten years after the shooting, an Islamic pilgrimage seeds in Bhuiyan a strange idea: if he is ever to be whole, he must reenter Stroman's life. He publicly forgives Stroman, and wages a legal and public-relations campaign to have his attacker spared from the death penalty.
First publish date: 2014
Authors: Anand Giridharadas
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Books similar to True American (6 similar books)
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.From the Hardcover edition.
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Andrew Delbanco traces the spiritual and national symbols that have shaped American aspirations from early English settlements to today, exploring how Protestantism, nation‑state myth, and modern decline influence contemporary longing.
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In Hate Crime, journalist Joyce King examines the 1998 James Byrd, Jr. murder in Jasper, Texas, exploring the killers’ motives, prison influence, and the impact on a black Texan woman.
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