Ocean State Libraries

"Award-winning journalist, J. Malcolm Garcia's, essays highlight the struggle, survival, and endurance of average people affected by the injustices of America's remorseless mammoth institutions and public indifference. They include families and small businesses still recovering from the BP Oil Spill; the man sentenced to life in prison for transporting drugs to save his son's life; the widows of soldiers who died, not in war, but from toxic fumes...

"Inspires young learners to explore America's government institutions through the nation's history and the experience of modern Americans.[This book] will interweave historical context, events, and personalities with the experiences of modern Americans to help students understand key social studies topics including the origins of American institutions and values and their relevance to young people's lives today. The book explores the institutions...

Children living in poverty have the same God-given potential as children in wealthier communities, but on average they achieve at significantly lower levels. Kids who both live in poverty and read below grade level by third grade are three times as likely not to graduate from high school as students who have never been poor. By the time children in low-income communities are in fourth grade, they're already three grade levels behind their peers in...

"These wide-ranging essays--on many individual political, economic, cultural and legal issues--have as a recurring underlying theme the decline of the values and institutions that have sustained and advanced American society for more than two centuries...Whether these essays (originally published as syndicated newspaper columns) are individually about financial bailouts, illegal immigrants, gay marriage, national security, or the Duke University...

Sometimes differing with his own Southern Baptist denomination, Carter expresses his personal view on abortion, capital punishment, homosexuality, women's rights, environmentalism, evolution, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, pre-emptive war, fundamentalism, and the mixing of religion and politics.