Read this book & Happy Thanksgiving!

Photo by Megan Watson on Unsplash

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I am thankful for the thousands of members of this historic community who are willing to share part of their day reading my missives.

I’m thankful for my family, and to my parents for leaving everything they owned to get us out of Fidel Castro’s brutal dictatorship so my brothers and I could grow up in a free country. Which brings me to today’s book report.

This morning I opted out of the daily, depressing ritual of reading news about the latest political crazy to read a 68-page book that captures the essence and promise of this country.

“The Greatest Sentence Ever Written”, by Walter Isaacson, uses the editing process for the preamble to the Declaration of Independence as a springboard to examine the philosophies that guided our founding.

Isaacson, whose biographies include works on Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs, makes no excuses for the moral contradiction shown by brilliant men who squabbled about slavery and restricted the rights of women and Native Americans.

He focuses on their novel concept of founding a nation governed with the consent of its citizens, not royalty; the concept that men have inalienable rights that stem from their creator.

And he argues that in these polarized times, we should strive to find the common ground we have in our founding principles to move forward. He notes Benjamin Franklin liked to say that compromisers do not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.

I bought two as stocking stuffers for my kids.

Let me know if you like it! And please feel free to post your opinion about our conflicted times.