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Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy | 
 enlarge | Author: Natan Sharansky
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 29482
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 158648513X
Dewey Decimal Number: 321.8
EAN: 9781586485139
ASIN: 158648513X
Publication Date: March 24, 2008
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080904214033T
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Product Description
Who is better prepared to confront challenges and defend principles in a volatile modern world? Those with strong national, religious, ethnic, or tribal identities who accept democracy, or democrats who renounce identity as a kind of divisive prejudice? Natan Sharansky, building on his personal experience as a dissident, argues that valueless cosmopolitanism, even in democracies, is dangerous. Better to have hostile identities framed by democracy than democrats indifferent to identity. In a vigorous, insightful challenge to the left and right alike, Natan Sharansky, as he has proved repeatedly, is at the leading edge of the issues that frame our times.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
First review September 1, 2008
Defending Identity by Natan Sharansky
The concept of "Identity" was an usual one for me to grasp at times but Mr. Sharansky continued to explain and elucidate. His idea became not only understandable but important.
A Fascinating Read August 29, 2008
Social/political books are often dense and hard to read, but this one is fascinating. An eye-opening analysis of modern ideologies and their paradoxical effects, e.g., the support by liberals for terrorist movements. Through examples from societies across the globe, Sharansky makes a convincing case that embracing the various identities (religious, national, etc.) of its constituents makes a democracy much stronger.
This should be required reading for every American August 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Sharansky opens the book talking about his time in The Gulag and the type of character it takes to survive the brutality and torcher despensed at the hands of the KGB. He talks about the current utopian world vision that seeks to undermine the West and what it will take to defeat it. He wrote this book to America to inspire American's to live up to the ideals that beat back and defeated Communism and Natzism. Today we face the new ideology of Post Nationalism, an old idea dressed up in new clothing, couched in new retoric, but whose mission reamins the same.
Timely publication August 25, 2008
The importance of the nation state as opposed to 'world government' cannot be overemphasized. The great thinker Nathan Sharansky has written another great book, now dealing with this urgent issue.
 Convincing position and well thought out! July 31, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The first half of the book covers the period while he was a prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union. he State sought to control the people by suppressing diversity. The pressure inside the prisons to give in to the interogators was, in his view, only countered by a strong sense of identity. Sharanksy came to the point of view that the essence of the dissident movement was in a common desire to respect and encourage distinct identities rather than be sublimated by the State. He describes forging alliances between different groups such as Pentecostals, Latvian Nationalist and Zionists based on respect for each other's identities. He also has kind words for the firmness and support of the cause of freedom by President Ronald Reagan.
Of note, Sharansky relates that when he was released the guards told him that he had to leave immediately and in his prison clothes. He refused saying he would only leave in a dignified fashion in normal street clothes - a move copied by the terrorist Samir Kuntar when he was released from an Israeli prison.
The second half of the book covers the period in Israel when Sharansky was in government and twice resigned from a ministerial position. Here too the importance of identity is covered where he sees that Arafat and the Palestinians actively sought to attack Israel's Jewish identity by not only demanding the temple mount but by denying (against all historical evidence) that the 1st and 2nd Temple were in Jerusalem.
I cannot help but feel that this book was heavily influenced by the essay by Ze'ev Maghen, "Imagine: On Love and Lennon" in the book "New Essays on Zionism" published last year in which Sharansky was also published. Like Maghen, Sharansky picks on the seductive words of Lennon's "Imagine" and its picturing of a world without identity, but also without anything to live for as well. (Love the song, but Lennon's dystopia is now somewhat unnerving.)
Originally I was going to give the book a 5 star rating - but I was so impressed that I ran out and read his previous book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror - which was even better.
On the political side Sharansky is definitely a man to watch and listen to, especially given the leadership contest that has begun in Israel. It is possibly that he has permanently moved on from politician to pundit, but it is also possibly that he may be pulled in once more into a ministerial role, with an outside possibility of something higher.
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