Your America: Democracy's Local Heroes

By Jason Maloney and John Siceloff

Book Overview

In Your America , award-winning producers John Siceloff and Jason Maloney explore the paths to success of a remarkable group of people, each of whom has appeared on NOW, the popular PBS show, to tell their stories. For everyone interested in change at a local and national level, this book provides a blueprint for working together locally to create a better global community. Your America introduces twelve ordinary citizens who are accomplishing extraordinary changes in their communities. Among them: *Bill Graham, mayor of tiny Scottsburg, Indiana, who took on the telecommunications giants and wired his town to provide Wi-Fi for all. *Katie Redford, a young law student who dusted off the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 and ended up changing the way American corporations behave overseas. *Wynona Ward, who drove long-haul trucks as she studied to be a lawyer and founded an organization, Have Justice, Will Travel, that reaches out to abused women in isolated homes and communities.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0230614388
• ISBN13: 9780230614383
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A book of hope

You can't walk away from this book without feeling inspired to set about on some course of change. "Your America" profiles twelve seemingly ordinary people from vastly different backgrounds - including ethnic, social, political, professional - who have all stumbled across problems in their respective communities and set out on remarkable journeys to arrive at creative and original solutions towards fixing those problems. One of the many bright spots in each of their stories is that they don't simply complain - rather they work proactively toward resolving the issue, often despite considerable odds stacked against them. For example, there's Wynona Ward, a truck driver who suffered sexual abuse as a child and eventually got her law degree and formed an innovative organization aimed specifically at helping abused rural women. There's also Rueben Martinez, a modest Latino barber and factory worker who, in his mid-fifties, grew an enormous literary movement right out of his barbershop. Each story is vividly written, moving, often poignant and always stirring. Every chapter left me shaking my head in admiration at the determination, spunk and grit of these people - a book that truly lifts the spirit in a time of so much cynicism, doom and gloom.