Fight of the Century
4.0/ 5
2 ratings
About This Book
To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation's premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization's one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in--Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona--need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights--which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU's spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU's stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment. To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union asked authors to contribute an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. Since its founding on January 19, 1920, the ACLU remains the nation's premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. This collection takes readers inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some are the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in; others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. -- adapted from jacket
Track Your Reading
Sign in to save this book, track pages, log finished reads and rereads, and build your Reading Diary.
Sign InAmerican civil liberties unionCivil rights, united statesLaw, united statesNew York Times reviewedCivil rightsCasesDroits de l'hommeJurisprudenceLITERARY COLLECTIONS / EssaysPOLITICAL SCIENCE / Civil RightsHISTORY / United States / GeneralHISTORY
The Swinging Light
Book Details
First Published
2020
Pages
336 pages
Rating
4.0 / 5
Ratings
2
Editions
3
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Language
ENG
Status
Published
The People Behind The Book
Authors
You May Also Like
Recommended Books
Hearing before the United States Commission on Civil Rights
1967
United States Commission on Civil Rights.
![The United States in Literature [with three long stories] -- Seventh Edition cover](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6699609-L.jpg)
The United States in Literature [with three long stories] -- Seventh Edition
1952
James Edwin Miller, Carlota Cárdenas de Dwyer, Kerry M. Wood, John Smith, William Bradford, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd II, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet, Taylor, Edward, Phillis Wheatley, Philip Morin Freneau, Benjamin Franklin, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, James W. C. Pennington, Francis Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edgar Allan Poe, Edward Rowe Snow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Seattle Chief, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Mollie Dorsey Sanford, Sidney Lanier, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Satanta, Chief Joseph, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, James Thurber, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Frost, Countee Cullen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot, James Weldon Johnson, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Phyllis McGinley, Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, Margaret Walker, Robinson Jeffers, Louise Bogan, Lewis Thomas, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Robert Anderson, Lillian Hellman, Patrick F. McManus, William Least Heat Moon, Richard Rodriguez, Sabine R. Ulibarrí, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Mona Van Duyn, Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov, David Wagoner, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, Karl Jay Shapiro, Adrienne Rich, Richard Eberhart, May Swenson, Mari Evans, Maxine Kumin, Elizabeth Bishop, Howard Nemerov, Robert Lowell, Galway Kinnell, William Stafford, Randall Jarrell, Gwendolyn Brooks, John N. Morris, Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, Vern Rutsala, N. Scott Momaday, Lawson Fusao Inada, Jim Wayne Miller, James Masao Mitsui, Gary Soto, Leslie Silko, Teresa Palomo Acosta, Isaac Asimov, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Carson McCullers, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O'Connor, Ray Bradbury, Eugenia Collier, Annie Dillard, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Walter Blair, Paul Farmer, Theodore Hornberger, Margaret Wasson, Conrad Richter, Bernard Augustine De Voto, Pearl S. Buck, Robert Penn Warren, William Saroyan, Conrad Aiken, Sinclair Lewis, Esther Forbes, Byrd, William, John Smith, George Washington, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Herman Melville, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Henry Timrod, Abram Joseph Ryan, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, O. Henry, Tom Wolfe, Stephen Vincent Benét, Irwin Shaw, Paul Engle, W. H. Auden, Vachel Lindsay, Leonie Adams, James Wright, Ogden Nash, David McCord, Morris Bishop, Richard Willard Armour, Don Marquis, E. J. Kahn, Paul Horgan, W. L. White, John Davenport, E. B. White, Jacques Barzun, George Santayana, Cleveland Amory, Norman Cousins, Frank C. Laubach, Vannevar Bush, Jesse Stuart, Douglas Southall Freeman, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Philip Hamburger, Eugene O'Neill, Robert C. Pooley, Clarence Day, Thornton Wilder, Theresa Helburn, Brad Schulberg
