Book Review: How Books Can Save Democracy (OT) (a little book with big ideas)

 How Books Can Save Democracy, by Michael Fischer (Trinity University Press, 12.95$, 2025, 84pp)

A Little Book That Packs a Big Wallop!

A book so small you can fit it easily in a pocket - new meaning for pocketbook! 

All I can say is, "Wow!" This is the book that can save democracy. It is best for a conversation-starter like in a book club or an upperclass college seminar (where the students have lived a bit and experienced different situations and, perhaps, different cultures, or at least have known different generations and SESs (socio-economic status').

When I found myself highlighting nearly every page in this little book, I knew I had to stop, and start to sing its praises.

How Books Can Save Democracy should be required reading for boards of directors and elected leaders, or anyone encountering varying opinions, power and responsibility for others.   

In a nutshell, literature and resulting discussions are safe places to practice disagreement and compromise, and that can be a good lesson for plain old families like those whose members disagree about politics over Thanksgiving dinner, especially if alcohol is served. People can agree to disagree which is more than simply avoiding a certain subject: it means a give-and-take in the conversation, finding some points to agree on and others not to.

Using titles and quotes from well-known books and authors, from Desmond Tutu to Dickens, author Michael Fischer, an English professor, opens the book with a multi-page synopsis from a case in point: in the park one day, three women friends find they disagree and argue when along comes a man who listens in and sparks them to stop, look and listen to each other. They eventually do.

Suggestion

I would make the opening literary synopsis shorter and from a book most people are familiar with as I would for most of the examples - being a STEM person I am not familiar with much of English literature so perhaps examples from children's books might be more meaningful. I would get more out of examples from To Kill a Mockingbird

or Tom Sawyer,

for example.

However

On the whole, this is an excellent little book to take along with you and read slowly over and over again.