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My new book is out next week!

My new book, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man, will be published next week. It's already available for preorder on Amazon, and it will soon be available in audio format, too (as read by me). I hope you all will enjoy my tribute to this heroic and brilliant man, whose bicentennial is in February.

Why write a biography of Douglass, who, after all, wrote three autobiographies himself? Well, this is my effort to summarize his life and major intellectual contributions as succinctly as possible. In the vein of Hitchens's book on Jefferson or Anne Heller's book on Hannah Arendt, I was aiming for a 100-page or so precis on a man I admire immensely, focusing on his ideas as much as possible. Douglass' most popular lecture, one he delivered over 50 times in the last half of his life, was "Self-Made Men," and his life is a real testament to the virtues of the self-made man. I wanted to focus on that and on the political system he believed necessary to make America a land of self-made people.

I have some upcoming appearances about the book:

February 8 - Washington, D.C.: the Cato Institute. 1000 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. Washington, D.C

February 12 - Phoenix, AZ: The Newton/Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W Camelback Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85013

February 21 - Austin, TX: Austin Federalist Society, Truluck Restaurant, 400 Colorado St, Austin, TX 78701

March 13 - Sacramento, CA: America's Future Foundation (location TBD)

March 14 - San Francisco, CA: America's Future Foundation (location TBD)

April 16 - San Francisco, CA: (TBD)

August 16-19 - Richmond, VA: TOS CON, Hilton Downtown Richmond 501 E Broad St, Richmond, VA 23219

Luv, Truluv

I'm participating in the new Pop Culture and Philosophy collection, 1984 and Philosophy, which appears this June. My essay, "Luv, Truluv," focuses on the role of love in the novel: how that relates to individualism and freedom, and how the distinctive feature of Big Brother's totalitarianism is that it seeks to compel the feeling of love in the citizen. Check it out!

Sunrise and sunset in Arizona

Yesterday: sunrise en route to Tucson, sunset at home.

Apoptosis

My poem “Apoptosis” has been published in this month’s Ghazal Page.

This was my first effort at a ghazal. If the form seems strange to you, here’s how it works.

RIP Reed Hopper

I was saddened to learn of the passing of my former PLF colleague, Reed Hopper, over the Christmas holiday. Reed had a long and interesting life, and by the time I came to know him, over 15 years ago, he had become one of the most important environmental law attorneys in the country. He won two Supreme Court cases, Rapanos v. United States and Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes, and was a resolute, principled, and tireless advocate for sensible and constitutionally limited environmental policy in the lower courts, too. Although his opponents would often assail him as an extremist anti-environmental zealot, etc., etc., he actually had a very level-headed and moderate approach to these questions, believing that environmental protection was important, but also that it should be carefully restrained by the Constitution to protect the rights of human beings.

And he had an almost unsurpassed skill in cutting through the nonsense of a case to the core legal principle involved. He was always helpful to me in cases that we worked on together, particularly in an economic liberty case I did in Missouri. We were doing a moot court, and in the middle of it, Reed began asking questions on a subject that I had not really anticipated and that I thought it unlikely that the court would address. I remember leaving the moot court with a superior air, thinking it silly that he asked those questions, but I looked up the answers anyway, just in case--and sure enough, they ended up being front-and-center when the hearing was held. He was also a superb writer, who taught me some extraordinarily helpful tips about arguing in print. I always respected his legal judgment, and his skills in presenting an argument. He was a quiet man, whose name may not have been prominent, but his keen mind will be missed by all of us in this profession.

Speaking at U. Nebraska Law School Jan. 18

I'll be in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 18 to speak to the Federalist Society there on The Permission Society.

Happy New Year 2018

Photo by Christina Sandefur

All I know is this:

                                   I woke today
with joy pulsing like a stream of light
throughout my veins; childlike delight
at yellow dawn instead of grey
fog.

            And I marvel in the way
every particle of life is right;
every branch and hinge and bird alike
inspires wonder; that sunsets follow day;
that the sea has waved since time began; that clouds
can fly and fold above our heads.

                                                         and we,
beings of blood and tissue and bone and light
and passions--you and I, here and now,
and feeling this, are totally unique?

What I know is: gratitude is life.