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Book summary

In these essays occasioned by the post-9/11 changes in America, esteemed magazine editor and essayist Lewis Lapham writes on what he sees as the threats to free speech and dissent contained in new powers granted by Congress to the President in the USA PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Acts. Lapham describes as unacceptable what were previously unthinkable incursions into everyday life; he sees them as an unbridled assault by a government without oversight--a veritable grab for power. Behind the four long essays that make up the book is an awareness of the long arc of free speech from the earliest days of the American republic. The title essay presents a history lesson of how wars have been used to whip up the masses and to cow the press. "Audible Silence" describes the immediate change in tone and content that followed 9/11, and shows how it led quickly to the march to war in Iraq. In "The Mute Button" Lapham takes the press to task for not speaking up as the fourth estate should. "Democracy in Irons" addresses why free speech and dissent are important, and what happens when they are trampled. In the tradition of the earlier patriots and pamphleteers he invokes, including Tom Paine, Lapham's arguments, some of which originally appeared in Harper's magazine, bring an urbane and informed mind to the issues at hand.