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
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