Hot Off the Press
New Books from John Edwards and Andy Stern

Two featured speakers at LAANE’s City of Justice Awards Dinner are promoting new books. A Country That Works: Getting America Back on Track, released in early October, draws from SEIU International President Andy Stern’s experience as a social worker, a father, an organizer and a labor leader. He revisits some of the seminal moments of change in the United States and across the globe, and makes clear that we cannot rely on our political leaders to take the lead in making change.

Meanwhile, Senator John Edwards has been on tour promoting Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives, a series of vignettes about the first homes of the famous and the little known. “Whether it was a small apartment or a mansion, in a city or on a farm, home is where we learned our values, took our first steps into the larger world and began to become who we are today,” Edwards writes. Below are excerpts from the two books.

Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives

In this excerpt, Danny Glover, one of the contributors to Home, writes about one of his first residences.

The first house my family owned was in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. We moved into it in 1957, when I was eleven years old. Before that, we lived in subsidized housing. We were among a group of families first to move into a mixed neighborhood, away from the two neighborhoods in San Francisco that had been home to African Americans.

Our neighborhood was made up of newer houses adjacent to Golden Gate Park, built in the twenties like ours, and older ones—big houses—some had been owned by shipping magnates.

We lived upstairs and rented out the downstairs. I can tell you what our house looked like, but the thing I remember most is what living in it was like. The thing about my home was that everyone participated in the work that had to be done. When we had to paint the house, my dad, my brother Reginald, and I painted the house. When cleaning needed to be done, someone would mop the kitchen floor, someone would wax the kitchen floor, someone would clean the bathroom. (To read more, visit http://oneamericacommittee.com/excerpt-home.)

A Country That Works: Getting America
Back on Track

Americans understand that hard work and personal responsibility are the foundation of our economy. People want a hand up, not a hand out—a chance to rise as high as their abilities can take them. Families want to live comfortably. They want to be able to pay their bills and put food on the table, without the recurring monthly worry that they won’t have enough to cover their expenses. Or that an unexpected health crisis would empty their bank accounts.

Americans expect their government to work for them, opening the doors of success and ensuring basic fairness for everyone. Americans workers grasp that the world and work are changing from 9-to-5 to 24/7, and that global competition is forcing employers to change as well. Workers hope their employers will treat them as assets, not as unnecessary costs in the balance sheet of change.

What Americans wish for is not that complicated, and, luckily, the answers surround us. What is missing is the passion and national political will—the great winds of change—to shape a new American plan for our economy, a way for America to ride the unending waves of change safely to shore. (For more information, visit www.aCountryThatWorks.com.)