LADY OF THE LOTUS BORN

Gyalwa Changchub & Namkhai Nyingpo, Lady of the Lotus-Born: The Life and Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyal: A Transltion of The Lute Song of the Gabdharvas, A Revelation in Eight Chapters of the Secret History of the Life and Enlightenment of Yeshe Tsogyal, Queen of Tibet: A Treasured text committed to writing by Gyalwa Changchub and Namkhai Nyingpo, Discovered by Terton Taksham Smten Lingpa, translated by the Padmakara Translation Group, with a Foreword by Jigme Khyentse Rinpoche (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2002) ("'Many times have I vowed to have no attachment in any circumstances for my body, speech, and mind. These living beings that we call insects have risen due to karma. Why should I be frightened by the magic sleights of wicked spirits? All actions are the issue of thoughts, good or ill; and since all that happens thus is merely thought, I should accept everything equally.' And in this spirit of confidence she sang: What we understand to be phenomena / Are but the magical projections of the mind. / The hollow vastness of the sky / I never saw to be afraid of anything. // All this is but the self-glowing light of clarity. / There is no other cause at all. / All that happens is but my adornment. / Better, then, to stay in silent meditation." Id. at 85.).

G. K. CHESTERTON

G. K. Chesterton, The Everyman Chesterton, edited and introduced by Ian Ker (New York: Everyman's Library/Knopf, 2011). (From 'The Suicide of Thought': "[The] peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought..." Id. at 284, 285. "There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped." Id. at 286.).

Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A  Biography (Oxford & New York: Oxord U. Press, 2011).

ELENA FERRANTE

Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2002, 2005).

Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2006, 2008).

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend: Book One: The Neapolitan Novels: Childhood, Adolescence, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2012) ("How was it possible that a boy of eighteen could speak not generically, in sorrowful accents, about poverty, the way Pasquale did, but concretely, impersonally, citing precise facts. 'Where did you learn those things?' 'You just have to read.' 'What?' 'Newspapers, journals, the books that deal with these problems.'" Id. at 323-324. "I struggled to find questions, I listened closely to his endless answers. I quickly grasped, however, that a single fixed idea constituted the thread of his conversation and animated every sentence: the rejection of vague words, the necessity of distinguishing problems clearly, hypothesizing practical solutions, intervention." Id. at 324.).

Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name: Book Two: The Neapolitan Novels, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2012, 2013) ("'Will you give me one of your books?' she asked. I looked at her in bewilderment. She wanted to read? How long since she had opened a book, three, four years? And why now had she decided to start again? I took the volume of Beckett, the one I used to kill the mosquitoes, and gave it to her. It seemed the most accessible text I had." Id. at 204-205. Also see Joseph Luzzi, "It Started in Naples," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/29/2013.).

Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: Book Three: The Neapolitan Novels: Middle Time, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2014) ("'Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.'" Id. at 237. See Roxana Robinson, "Between Women," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/7/2014. "There are many ways to examine crime. The Camorra and the Mafia have long held a sinister and glamorous fascination. The Sopranos, with their vulgar, expensive suburban house and mostly ordinary family life, present a skewed version of the American dream, suggesting that the Mafia is simply an alternative form of authority. Ferrante reminds us that crime corrodes, that violence and dishonesty have a deep and permanent impact on society. She knows how they destroy the family, that most essential soctal unit; how the Camorra undermines the father's authority, the mother's love, the children's futures.").

Elena Ferrante, Troubling Love, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 1999, 2006).

ON LYING

Dallas G. Denery II, The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("The ground shifts, and the question of lying finds itself irrevocably separated from God and the Devil. Even as we continue to ask Is it ever acceptable to lie? and even as the answers we come up with appear unaltered (yes, no, sometimes, never), the framework is new. Beneath a settled and seemingly unchanged facade, everything has changed, as if, having lived too long in exile, we one day realize paradise had never existed in the first place." Id. at 256. From the bookjacket: "For medieval and early modern Christians, the problem of the lie was the problem of human existence itself. To ask, 'Is it ever acceptable to lie?' was to ask how we, as sinners, should live in a fallen world. As it turns out, the answer to that question depended on who did the asking. The Devil Wins uncovers the complicated history of lying from the early days of the Catholic Church to the Enlightenment, revealing the diversity of attitudes about lying by considering the question from the perspectives of five representative voices--the Devil, God, theologians, courtiers, and women. [Denery] shows how the lie, long thought to be the source or worldly corruption, eventually became the very basis of social cohesion and peace.").

ON FAIRY TALES

Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2014) ("The situations in fairy tales also captures deep terrors of occurrences common and, mercifully, uncommon." " Unspeakable--unbelievable--acts are also always taking place. Terrible family violence: a father cuts off his daughter's hands, because the Devil wants to carry her off; another daughter disguises herself in a coat of animal hides after her father wants to marry her. Small children are damaged: Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their mother and father to die in the woods and then narrowly escape a cannibal witch. And so on. These are acts which contradict all ideas of natural feelings. But these situations, however horribly they beat belief, have been spoken of in the stories, and they are echoed, week by week, in the news. When a child dies at the hands of parents who have starved and tortured him, as in the case of Daniel Pelka, and nobody moves to help him; when young girls are kidnapped and held prisoner by an apparently ordinary man in an ordinary American suburb; and when Josef Fritzl imprisons his daughter in a cellar and keeps her there for twenty-four years, fathering seven children on her until he was discovered in 2008, then fairy tales can be recognized as witnesses to every aspect of human nature. They also act to alert us--or hope to." Id. at 79-80 From the bookjacket: "In this short history, Marin Warner explores a multitude of tale through the ages and their manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. Using a glittering array of examples,  . . . she persuasively demonstrates how fairy tales reflect and shape human understanding and culture." Also see Aimee Bender, "Casting Spells," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/25/2015.).

Andrew Lang, ed., The Blue Fairy Book, with an introduction by Joan Aiken, paintings and decorations by Charles van Sandwyk (London: The Folio Society, 2003).


Andrew Lang, ed., The Red Fairy Book, with an introduction by Marina Warner, paintings and decorations by Niroot Puttapipat (London: The Folio Society, 2008).

Kazui Ishiguro, The Buried Giant: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2015) (See Neil Gaiman, "Here Be Dragons," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/1/2015.).

WHEN A NATION LOSES ITS MORAL AND POLITICAL MIND

Frederick Brown, The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940 (New York: Knopf, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "The Embrace of Unreason picks up where Brown's previous book, For the Soul of France, left off to tell the story of France in the decades leading up to World War II." "We see trough the lives of three writers (Maurice Barres, Charles Maurras and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle) how the French intelligentsia turned away from the humanistic traditions and rationalistic ideals born out of the Enlightenment in favor of submission to authority that stressed patriotism, militarism, and xenophobia; how French extremists, traumatized by the horrors of the battlefront and exalted by the glories of wartime martyrdom, tried to redeem France's collective identity, as Hitler's shadow lengthened over Europe." Might America be tending toward its own "embrace of unreason" in the decade and a half since 9/11? Think Tea Party. Think anti-immigration sentiments. Think Patriot Act. Think Ferguson, Missouri, and race relations. Think Citizens United.).

READING MY LIFE

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014) ("Though you can retire with an injury, you can't walk away because you feel bad." Id. at 65. (Also see Holly Bass, "How It Feels to Be Black in America," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/28/2014.).

GLOBAL CORPORATIONS, PRIVATE GOVERNMENTS, AND DECLINE OF THE NATION-STATE

Franklin Foer, ed., Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Political and Culture in America (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).

This is a collection of pieces from The New Republic. As the collection's editor notes, this "is more than the greatest hits of he magazine. [] It was put together in the spirit of the magazine that it anthologizes: it is an argument about what matters." Id. at xxvi-xxvii. Due to my being in the process of putting together a course on International Trade Law to teach next fall, thinking about International Law generally, and regularly teaching Corporation Law (or Business Organizations), a passage from Hans J. Morgenthau's November 9, 1974 piece, "Power and Powerlessness: Decline of Democratic Government," struck a note. Perhaps Citizens United is also in the back of my mind.

"It has become trivial to say--because It is so obvious and has been said so often--that the modern technologies of transportation, communication and warfare have made the nation-state, as principle of political organization, as obsolete as the first industrial revolution of the steam engine did feudalism. While the official governments of the nation-states go through their constitutional motions of governing, most of the decisions that affect the vital concerns of the citizens are rendered by those who control these technologies, their production, their distribution, their operation, their price. The official governments can at best marginally influence these controls, but by and large they are compelled to accommodate themselves to them. They are helpless in the face of steel companies raising the price of steel or a union's striking for and receiving higher wages. Thus governments, regardless of their individual peculiarities, are helpless in the face of inflation; the relevant substantive decisions are not made by them by by private governments whom the official governments are unwilling or unable to control. Thus we live, as was pointed out long ago, under the rule of a 'new feudalism' whose private governments reduce the official ones to a largely marginal and ceremonial existence.

"The global corporation (misnamed 'multinational' is the most stroking manifestation of this supercession of national governments not only in  their functional but territorial manifestations, For while the territorial limits of the private governments of the 'new feudalism,' as first perceived about two decades ago, still in great measure coincide with those of the nation-state, it is a distinctive characteristic of the global corporation that its very operations reduce those territorial limits to a functional irrelevancy.

"The governments of the modern states are not only, in good measure, unable to govern, but where they still appear to govern (and appearances can be deceptive) they are perceived as a threat to the welfare and very existence of their citizens. [] For it is the great political paradox of our time that a government, too weak to control the concentrations of private power that have usurped much of the substance of its power, has grown so powerful as to reduce the citizens to impotence."

Id. at 243, 247-248. Anyway, this is a very worthwhile anthology to read reflectively. It provides an opportunity to appreciate the changing face of 'American Liberalism,' in a world that has greatly change but, unfortunately, has remained the same.

THE PRINTING PRESS

Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, with an introduction by Jean-Marc Hovasse (New York: Everyman's Library/Knopf, 2013) ("In the fifteen century, everything underwent a change. Humanity discovered a means of perpetuating thought more lasting and durable than architecture, and even simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. To the tame letters of Orpheus are to succeed Gutenberg's letters of lead." "The book will destroy the building!" "The invention of printing was the greatest event in history. It was the supreme revolution. It meant the complete renovation of humanity's mode of expression, the discarding by human thought of one form to reclothe itself in another, the complete and final casting of the skin of that symbolic serpent, which, since Adam, had served as the representation of intellect." Id. at 174-175. Somehow I don't think the Internet has quite replaced the Book.).

THE RELEVANCE OF HOMER

Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters (New York: Henry Holt, 2014) ([M]y Homer is a thousand years older. His power and poetry derive not from the situation of a few emergent states in the eighth-century Aegean, but from a far bigger and more fundamental historic moment, in the centuries around 2000 BC, when early Greek civilization crystallized from the fusion of two very different worlds: the semi-nomadic, hero-based culture of the Eurasian steppes to the north and west of the Black Sea, and the sophisticated, authoritarian and literate cities and places of the eastern Mediterranean. Greekness--and eventually Europeanness--emerged from the meeting and melding of those worlds. Homer is the trace of that encounter--in war, despair and eventual reconciliation at Troy in the Iliad, in flexibility and mutual absorption in the Odyssey. Homer's urgency comes from the pain associated with that clash of worlds and his immediacy from the eternal principles at stake: What matters more, the individual or the community, the city or the hero? What is life, something of everlasting value or a transient and hopeless irrelevance?" Id. at 2. Also see Bryan Dowries, "Songs of the Sirens," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/28/2014.)

REFLECTIONS ON MUSLIMS IN AMERICA

Zareena Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (New York & London: NYU Press, 2014) (From the backcover: "Islam Is A Foreign Country explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslim: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? [] By examining the tension between American Muslims' ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.").

WE ARE NO BETTER THAN OUR ACTIONS, AND THE ACTIONS OF OUR AGENTS AND REPRESENTATIVES

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanamo Diary, edited by Larry Siems (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("'You are not a man! I am going to make you lick the dirty floor and tell me your story, beginning from the point when you got out your mother's vagina,' he continued. 'You haven't seen nothing yet.' He was correct, although he was the biggest liar I ever met. He lied so much that he contradicted himself because he would forget what he had said the last time about a specific topic. In order to give himself credibility, he kept swearing and taking the Lord's name in vain. I always wondered whether he thought I believed his garbage, though I always acted as if I did; he would have been angry if I called him a liar. He arrested big al Qaeda guys who talked about me being the bad guy, and he released them a thousand and one times from prison when they told the truth. The funny thing was he always forgot that he arrested and released them already." Id. at 181. From the book jacket" "Since 2002, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been imprisoned at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In all these years, the United Stats has never charged him with a crime. A federal judge ordered his release in March 2010, but the U.S. government fought that decision, and there is still no sign that the United States plans to let him go." "Three years into his captivity Slahi began a diary, recounting his life before he left his home on November 28, 2001, and disappeared into U.S. custody, his 'endess world tour' of imprisonment and interrogation, and his daily life as a Guantanamo prisoner. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice but a deeply personal memoir--terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. Published now for the first time, Guantanamo Diary is both a document of immense historical importance and a riveting and profoundly revealing read." Also see Mark Danner, "No Exit," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/1/2015.).

WE CANNOT REALLY KNOW

Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2014) (From the bookjacket: Gleiser "reaches a provocative conclusion: science, the main tool we use to find answers, is fundamentally limited. The essence of reality is unknowable.").

JOHN DEWEY, Part 2

John Dewey, The Essential Dewey, Volume 2: Ethics, Logic, Psychology, edited by Larry A. Hickman & Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press, 1998) (From "Moral Judgment and Knowledge": "There is a difference which must be noted between valuation as judgment (which involved thought in placing the thing judged in its relations and bearings) and valuing as a direct emotional and practical act. There is difference between esteem and estimation, between prizing and appraising. To esteem is to prize, hold dear, admire, approve; to estimate is to measure in intellectual fashion. One is direct, spontaneous; the other is reflex, reflective. We esteem before we estimate, and estimation comes in to consider whether and to what extent something is worthy of esteem. Is the object one which we should admire? Should we really prize it? Does it have the qualities which justify our holding it dear? All growth in maturity is attended with this change from a spontaneous to a reflective and critical attitude. First, our affections go out to something in attraction or repulsion; we like and dislike, Then experience raises the question whether the object in question is what our esteem or disesteem took it to be, whether it is such as to justify out reaction to it." Id. at 329. I would suggest we seriously consider (that is, reflect upon) whether we are living at a time of a chronic deficiency in the practice of questioning whether the things and people we admire (or, on the flip side, despise) should be.).

JOHN DEWEY, Part 1

John Dewey, The Essential Dewey, Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, edited by Larry A. Hickman & Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press, 1998) (From "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy": "We pride ourselves upon being realistic, desiring a hardheaded cognizance of facts, and devoted to mastering the means of life. We pride ourselves upon a practical idealism, a lively and easily moved faith in possibilities as yet unrealized, in willingness to make sacrifice for their realization. Idealism easily becomes a sanction of waste and carelessness, and realism a sanction of legal formalism in behalf of things as they are--the rights of the possessor. We thus tend to combine a loose and ineffective optimism with assent to the doctrine of take who take can: a deification of power. All peoples at all times have been narrowly realistic in practice and have then employed idealization to cover up in sentiment and theory their brutalities. But never, perhaps, has the tendency been so dangerous and so tempting as with ourselves. Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large take for our philosophy." Id. at 69. From "Nationalizing Education":. "I find that many who talk the loudest about the need of a supreme and unified Americanism of spirit really mean some special code or tradition to which they happen to be attached. They have some pet tradition which they would impose upon all. In thus measuring the scope of Americanism by some single element which enters into it they are themselves false to the spirit of America. Neither Englandism nor New-Englandism, neither Puritan nor Cavalier any more than Teuton or Slav, can do anything but furnish one note in a vast symphony." Id at 266-267. From "Education in Relation to Form": "[U]pon its intellectual side education consists in the formation of wide-awake, careful, thorough habits of thinking." Id. at 274.).

KNOW WHO YOU ARE!

 David Kiley, Driven: Inside BMW, the Most Admired Car Company in the World (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004) ("It wasn't until July 2002 interview with BMW chairman Dr. Helmut Panke that I realized the secret of BMW's success corresponded with some of the best advice I ever received from my own parents. [] 'Remember who you are.' [] I asked Panke, who was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. before joining BMW in 1982, what he would tell companies seeking insights from BMW if he were still charging McKinsey big bucks for his advice. Said Panke, 'I would say: Focus on understanding who you are, what you stand for. What are the values you have in the organization? What are the values you believe in for the products and services that you sell and provide? People like to play charades when they are children. But in real life you cannot impersonate other values and characters and basic principles. There is a sentence I often use to crystallize what we are about. And I think it's important to be able to do that: to articulate the one idea in one sentence that captures the company's character so that everyone understands and believes it. "BMW builds high-performance products because BMW is a high-performance organization." This is an idea that speaks not just to our products. It is across seemingly unrelated fields and organizations within the company. Striving for better performance than our competitors is something that drives our controllers and our human resources people, not just our designers and engineers." Id. at 3-4.).

BLACK REPUBLICANS: "INCONGRUOUS INTERSECTION OF CIVIL RIGHTS AND AMERICAN CONSERVATISM"

Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("One lingering question that this book hopes to address has been a topic of regular debate and discussion since the political realignment of black votes in the 1936 presidential election: Are black voters irrevocably lost to the Republican Party? The short answer s no, at least not at the local level, This study demonstrated that black voters were willing to support the right Republican candidate, so long as he or she (and the supporting state and local party organizations) demonstrated a genuine empathy toward African Americans, conducted sincere and aggressive outreach, and presented solutions that addressed issues of black concern; local politics undoubtedly offers a level of nuance that allows individual politicians to sidestep the rancor between African Americans and the GOP." Id. at 308. "The fundamental dilemma for the Republican Party in winning black voters at the national level boils down to issues of politics and policy. To put it another way, African Americans interpret the GOP's 'colorbling' approach as insensitive to their history and lived experience--a disconnect that is sorely exacerbated by the fact that Republicans rarely consider race except to use it as an antagonism. More to the point, colorblindness as a political strategy presents a quandary, because it presumes that everyone shares the same set of problems, histories and racial experiences; it sees the nation as a meritocracy, assumes equality, and sidesteps the complexities of race. Certainly there are commonalities that cross racial lines, kike economics and religion. Appealing to African American solely on these merits, though, does not work because the country, even as it professes to be race neutral, is in fact, race, conscious. As we have seen in this study,  not only did black Republicans understand this truth, but white Republican often did as well; yer many of matter group shied away from this approach, out of fear of alienating white voters." Id. at 309-310. From the bookjacket: "The Loneliness of the Black Republican provides a new understanding of the interaction between African Americans and the Republican Party, and the seemingly incongruous intersection of civil rights and American conservatism.).

EMPTINESS, or ABSOLUTE NOTHINGNESS

Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, translated with an Introduction by Jan Van Bragt; Foreword by Winston L. King (Berkeley & Los Angles: U. of California Press, 1982) (From the "Foreword": "In passing it is of some interest to inquire why there has been little or no inclusion of any Anglo-American materials in Professor Nishitani's writings. Perhaps the reasons are not far afield. Since Japan's 'opening to the West' her philosophers, for various incidental and cultural reasons, h ave been interested primarily in the Germanic tradition--and Nishitani was educated in this tradition. But doubtless the main reason is that the Anglo-American tradition has had little in it that has appealed to an Eastern and Buddhist-oriented culture. In the British tradition, for example, we have Reid's commonsense realism, practical, simplistic Utilitarianism, the empiricism and political philosophy of Locke, the God-centered idealism of Berkeley--none of which could have much appeal for a Buddhist-oriented thinker. As for American thought, almost the only American philosopher in whom Japan has taken an interest at all is John Dewey and his pragmatic 'learning by doing' educational theories. Indeed for most of Japan, America is not a land of thinkers but of merchants, manufacturers, technical entrepreneurs, and practical-minded enterprise." Id. at xv-xvi. From the bookcover:"In Religion and Nothingness the leading representative of the Kyoto School of Philosophy lays the foundations of thought for a world in the making, for a world united beyond the differences of East and West. Keiji Nishitani notes the irreversible trend of Western civilization to nihilism, and singles out the conquest of nihilism as the task for contemporary philosophy. Nihility, or relative nothingness, can only be overcome by being radicalized to Emptiness, or absolute nothingness. Taking absolute nothingness as the fundamental notion in rational explanations of the Eastern experience of human life, Professor Nishitani examines the relevance of this notion for contemporary life, and in particular for Western philosophical theories and religious beliefs. Everywhere his basic intention remains the same: to direct our modern predicament to a resolution through this insight." "The challenge that the thought of Keiji Nishitani presents to the West, as a modern version of an Eastern speculative tradition that is every bit as old and as variegated as our own, is one that brings into unity the principle of reality and the principle of salvation. In the process, one traditional Western idea after another comes under scrutiny: the dichotomy of faith and reason, of being and substance, the personal and the transcendent notions of God, the exaggerated rile given to the knowing ego, and even the Judeo-Christian view of history itself.")

SUSPICIOUS CIRCLES

OR, ON THE NATURE OF THE 1973-1976 POLITICAL DIVIDE AMONG AMERICANS WHICH HAS YET TO BE BRIDGED 40+ YEARS LATER.

Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) (THIS IS A MUST-READ BOOK!! From the bookjacket: "The Invisible Bridge is the story of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown--an account of the unprecedented loss of national confidence that took place in the United States between 1973 and 1976, the year when President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and Governor Ronald Reagan began his long march to the White House." Also, see Frank Rich, "A Distant Mirror," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/3/2014.).