The 8 best gardens of democracy 2019
Finding the best gardens of democracy suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
Finding the best gardens of democracy suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
Best gardens of democracy
1. The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
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Sasquatch BooksDescription
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calls The Gardens of Democracy one of his favorite books.In a post-election world with widespread political upheaval, a deep wellspring of civic engagement and collective action is beginning to emerge.Modern American life has become marked by divisive conversations about everything from racial and social justice to fighting the ever-widening income gap, environmental conservation, and how we might collaborate as active citizens to heal our democracy.InThe Gardens of Democracy, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer outline an argument for why our most basic assumptions about these topics need updating for the 21st century. For those finding their voice for the first time, this book offers a conceptual roadmap for a way forwardfor what they are resisting, why they resist, and for the better democracy they want to grow.
Liu and Hanauers ideas are simple but revolutionary: true self-interest is incomplete without tending to the shared best interests of the national community. They illustrate that to model positivity, good citizenship, and ensure liberty and justice for all, we must achieve compromise by reaching across the aisle and putting the power to execute programs back in the hands of individuals, not big government. True freedom does not live in isolation, and we must redefine how we view prosperity in order to move from a dog-eat-dog mentality that perpetuates the top 1 percent to a communal and inclusive movement that illustrates thatwere all better off when were all better off.
Timely, inspiring, and highly charged,The Gardens of Democracyis a much-needed call to action for citizens to embrace their roles in a democratic society.
2. Design for Ecological Democracy (The MIT Press)
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Shows how to combine the forces of ecological science and participatory democracy to design urban landscapes that enable us to act as communities, are resilient rather than imperiled, and touch our hearts.
Over the last fifty years, the process of community building has been lost in the process of city building. City and suburban design divides us from others in our communities, destroys natural habitats, and fails to provide a joyful context for our lives. In Design for Ecological Democracy, Randolph Hester proposes a remedy for our urban anomie. He outlines new principles for urban design that will allow us to forge connections with our fellow citizens and our natural environment. He demonstrates these principles with abundantly illustrated examplesdrawn from forty years of design and planning practiceshowing how we can design cities that are ecologically resilient, that enhance community, and that give us pleasure.
Hester argues that it is only by combining the powerful forces of ecology and democracy that the needed revolution in design will take place. Democracy bestows freedom; ecology creates responsible freedom by explaining our interconnectedness with all creatures. Hester's new design principles are founded on three fundamental issues that integrate democracy and ecology: enabling form, resilient form, and impelling form. Urban design must enable us to be communities rather than zoning-segregated enclaves and to function as informed democracies. A simple bench at a centrally located post office, for example, provides an opportunity for connection and shared experience. Cities must be ecologically resilient rather than ecologically imperiled, adaptable to the surrounding ecology rather than dependent on technological fixes. Resilient form turns increased urban density, for example, into an advantage. And cities should impel us by joy rather than compel us by fear; good cities enrich us rather than limit us. Design for Ecological Democracy is essential reading for designers, planners, environmentalists, community activists, and anyone else who wants to improve a local community.
3. Purple Hibiscus: A Novel
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Purple Hibiscus A NovelDescription
"One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation." Larissa MacFarquhar,The New Yorker
From the bestselling author ofAmericanahandWe Should All Be Feminists
Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at homea home that is silent and suffocating.
As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father's authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins' laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.
Purple Hibiscusis an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.
4. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
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Longlisted for the National Book AwardNew York Times Bestseller
A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life and threaten to rip apart our social fabric
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our liveswhere we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insuranceare being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.
But as Cathy ONeil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when theyre wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student cant get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), hes then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a toxic cocktail for democracy. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
Tracing the arc of a persons life, ONeil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These weapons of math destruction score teachers and students, sort rsums, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health.
ONeil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, its up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change.
Longlist for National Book Award (Non-Fiction)
Goodreads, semi-finalist for the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards (Science and Technology)
Kirkus, Best Books of 2016
New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2016 (Non-Fiction)
The Guardian, Best Books of 2016
WBUR's "On Point," Best Books of 2016: Staff Picks
Boston Globe, Best Books of 2016, Non-Fiction
5. Democracy in America
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University of Chicago PressDescription
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone.
When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of Democracy in Americaonly the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship.
6. It Can't Happen Here (Signet Classics)
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It Can t Happen HereDescription
The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trumps authoritarian appeal.SalonIt Cant Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewiss later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitlers aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.
Called a message to thinking Americans by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Cant Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as todays news.
With an Introduction by Michael Meyer
and an Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst
7. Tools for Radical Democracy: How to Organize for Power in Your Community
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Tools for Radical Democracy is an essential resource for grassroots organizers and leaders, students of activism and advocacy, and anyone trying to increase the civic participation of ordinary people. Authors Joan Minieri and Paul Getsos share stories and tools from their nationally recognized and award-winning work of building a community-led organization, training community leaders, and conducting campaigns that changed public policy and delivered concrete results to tens of thousands of people. This how-to manual includes:In-depth analysis of how to launch and win a campaign
Tools and guidelines for training people to lead their own campaigns and organizations
Insights for using technology effectively, building more powerful alliances, and engaging in the social justice movement
8. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
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Pantheon BooksDescription
In this pathbreaking work, now with a new introduction, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.Based on a series of case studiesincluding the medias dichotomous treatment of worthy versus unworthy victims, legitimizing and meaningless Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against IndochinaHerman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the medias behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the medias handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the medias treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.