America First

by Bill Kauffman

Book Overview

America First is a rarity among political books: first published in 1995, it remains more timely, relevant, and even urgent than ever. Lively and iconoclastic, it explores the rich heritage, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879759569
• ISBN13: 9780879759568
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Buy this book

It's wonderful! Interesting from start to finish. Transcends the tired and inaccurate Left-Right divisions. It played a role in my intellectual development and can do the same for you.

Solace for the lonely pacifist

This is an entertaining, entirely readable book about the men and women who went against the grain and refused to see the virtue in America's interventionism and imperialism in the 20th century. These are not the people who opposed the war in Vietnam. There are hundreds of books about that. These are the real isolationists: the ones who failed to support WWII in spite of the fact that their dissent ruined their reputations and sometimes careers. America First! is the ultimate book for people who refuse to follow the crowd and who cannot bring themselves to believe that sometimes it's okay to send young men to agony and death overseas. As the previous reviewer noted, Kauffman writes about people and the left and on the right because, of course, both parties were unabashedly in favor of fighting both world wars and pacifist conservatives and liberals were always on the fringes. Kauffman offers some memorable anecdotes and introduces some truly interesting characters (like the Roosevelt relative who helped FDR cheat on Eleanor but could not stomach his bloody war and wasn't ashamed to admit it). If you feel like you're the only pacifist on earth, read this book and discover that you're among some amazing company. Thank you, Mr. Kauffman.

How to build a Left-Right coalition

This terrific study of American "isolationism" (i.e., non-interventionism) may be one of the most important political manuals of the last several years. And it may be the first why-to/how-to guide for building a viable Left-Right political coalition. You see, as Kauffman explains it, an America First, mind-your-own-business foreign policy is one area where the far Left and the far Right have often agreed. Therefore, although you might expect this volume to be filled with profiles of Pat Buchanan and other right-wingers, it's not; rather, it examines the ideas of such notable America Firsters as Jack Kerouac, Gore Vidal, and Edward Abbey--all of them Men of the Left. The New Left of the 1960s and much of today's non-interventionist, anti-state Hard Right have a lot in common, Kauffman says. Perhaps it's time the two extremes joined hands in defiance of America's Military Industrial Complex