The Capital Cafe
The Capital Cafe

Author: Louis Brodsky

Publisher: Time Being Books

Published: 2014-05-08

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 1568092237

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The Capital Cafe is a collection of forty-eight poems, in two sections, set in a bedroom community of St. Louis and in a Missouri farm town. The poems build on each other like chapters in an engrossing novel. The first half is a slice of life observed by Moe Fischer, formerly a high-school English teacher, now a proofreader for the local newspaper, but always an eavesdropper, an oral historian, and a Jew, adrift in a belt of Baptist piety. The second section is a mosaic occurring at the "gas station turned cafe," related by rural Americans in seed caps and other regulars, such as the local car dealer, the mortician, and the Holsum Bread man, who spends his time winking furtively at the waitress (Reverend Bone's eighteen-year-old daughter). Brodsky makes the reader understand that Redneck, U.S.A., isn't so much a specific geographic location as it is a state of being that exists in every big city and four-way-stop hamlet across the nation.

Constitution Cafe
Constitution Cafe

Author: Christopher Phillips

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2011-08-22

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0393064808

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Thomas Jefferson proposed that we revise the Constitution every so often, not just to reflect the changing times but to revive and perpetuate our original revolutionary spirit. Could it be that the Constitution itself is part of the reason that our democracy is on life support, our government gone haywire? To find out, the author, originator of the Socrates Café dialogues, sets off on a cross-country junket to engage Americans of all stripes in an offbeat constitutional convention. Given the opportunity to rewrite the Constitution, a diverse bunch from Burning Man die hards to army veterans, Tea Party acolytes to Orange County slackers, weighs in with some really wild and worthwhile ideas about how our nation should be governed. With Jefferson as his iconoclastic and visionary guide, the author moderates these discussions and complements his participants' ideas by relating them to Jefferson's own experiences with governance and to his great expectations for our democracy. This book is an account of how we might draw from our rebellious past to incite meaningful change today; it is a map for inspiring Jeffersonian activism by tapping into our timely (and timeless) concerns about the need to give our country's democratic framework a makeover.