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Seeking the North Star - SAVE 50%!

Seeking the North Star - SAVE 50%!

Selected Speeches

by John R. Silber
Foreword by Tom Wolfe

Regular price $14.95 USD
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Product Details

Godine

Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-56792-507-4
Pages: 320
Size: 6.4" x 9.1"
Published: October 2013
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Here are speeches, essays, and articles from them man who turned Boston University into a major educational institution. John Silber speaks as an educator, parent, philosophical leader, and political observer and participant (Ahead in the polls, he probably would have been elected Governor of Massachusetts had he not run afoul of a beloved media personality. The famous incident is recounted in high style in Tom Wolfe’s foreword).

He tackles issues including education at all levels, culture and the media, democracy and international affairs. Delivered from 1971 to 2012, the speeches offer his incisive reflections on the Vietnam War, Watergate, student activism of the seventies, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, developments in science and technology, the increasing power of the media, global corporations, and many other issues. His style is lively, crisp, and pointed, spiked with his acerbic wit and guided by an ongoing search for wisdom.

Mr. Silber was a model of probity and integrity in both his private and his public life, an intellectual pessimist and a congenital optimist. Even as he transformed Boston University from a sleepy and fast-declining “streetcar college,” he spoke out on topical issues and principles on which our human fulfillment and national identity depended. Inspiring many and infuriating some, his was a life that mattered and his voice was one worth listening to.

John Silber
John Robert Silber was born in San Antonio in 1926. The seventh president of Boston University, he was, in addition, the first chairman of the Texas Society to Abolish Capital Punishment, a leader in the racial integration of the University of Texas, a member of the founding committee of Project Head Start, a member of President Reagan's Bipartisan Committee on Central America, the 1990 Democratic nominee for Governor of Massachusetts, and Chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education. His books include Straight Shooting: What's Wrong with America and How to Fix It, Architecture of the Absurd: How "Genius" Disfigured a Practical Art, and Kant's Ethics.

Author: Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe is widely considered one of the most important journalists of the twentieth century. His formally experimental nonfiction works, including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, had considerable influence over the New Journalism literary movement. He has received dozens of awards for his writing, including a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.