The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

In "End of America" Naomi Wolf makes some startling comparisons of the current administration with some of histories worst governments such as Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy. She contrasts those similarities with the Constitution.

A sentence from the book's Introduction portrays the author's warning, "We take our American liberty for granted the way we take our national resources for granted, seeing both, rather casually, as being magically self-replenishing."

Another point that the author makes very clear is that to change government citizens have to participate. If the Founding Fathers would have waited for someone else to do the work of changing what they couldn't tolerate, there wouldn't be a United States of America.

She states on page 29 that while it is difficult to sustain an open society, it is easy to close one down. That PATRIOT Act succeeded in eroding a lot of civil liberties.
This is driven home by the mention of the author being on a list for air travel. This is especially disturbing as a form of bizarre punishment for those who disagree with the current administration. In itself, this is a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment protection against arbitrary search and seizure.

Another unconstitutional tool she mentions is the signing statement that G.W. Bush has abused far more than any other president. Americans are living under laws that Congress has never voted on and this tool puts Bush above the law.

Naomi Wolf has written a concise, yet powerful book about where we are now and how we should participate in the process of changing government. The power of the vote is only enhanced by participation. It's a call to Conservatives, Liberals, Independents, and any party affilitiations to take notice and get involved.

Very well thought out book. Consider ourselves warned. We are already on this path unless drastic changes happen I am afraid all liberties will be lost.

I think she makes a few rather vague comparisons in a couple chapters that I felt took away some of her credibility.. There were several examples where she simply added a short tidbit of information to enforce her thesis without telling the reader why it was important.

In short, if you're looking for a detailed analysis comparing the shifts of former Fascist countries to the recent shifts in the United States, then this book is not for you. It does, however, provide a good starting point for your own research (her listing of footnote sources and bibliography span 17 pages).

Overall though, I believe this book to be well written and researched, and would recommend it to everyone concerned with preserving your constitutional liberties here in America. I look forward to reading her newest book, "Give Me Liberty."

I thought I'd heard all I could of the political, military and social commentary of our time, but I gave this book a chance.
What an excellent book, compelling, well-voiced and the most concise presentation of the socio-pilitical ills brought about by our current administration. Scary and provoking.

This is a thoroughly goofy book. For someone who likes to preach about the sins of inaccurate public commentary these days, Wolf gets quite a bit wrong. Adam Gaddahn was not charged in a sealed indictment - his indictment was very public, He was not indicted for exercising his First Amendment rights. It was for joining Al Qaida and working to kill Americans. Ward Churchill was not fired for his post-9/11 statements, but for plagiarism. If James Yee is threatened with prosecution for discussing his experiences, that has not deterred him from writing a book. Brandon Mayfield was never charged with a crime. Wrong again.

The hardest thing for me to understand is how Naomi can defend the rights of people like Gaddahn and Churchill yet argue that Presidential signing statements are wrongheaded. These statements merely provide the public with the current Chief Executive's view of legislation, and they are the Executive Branch's equivalent of legislative history. If more verbal content is always good, why does she view Presidential signing statements with such hostility? It's undoubtedly because the current occupant of the White House is a Republican. When Jimmy Carter was pontificating about human rights, his Presidential statements were welcomed. In other words, Wolf's complaints amount to content discrimination.

To write this book, Wolf had to go back and read about all the things she ignored at Yale, when she was too busy getting arrested protesting American efforts to prevent Salvadorans from falling under Communism to truly understand the perils that existed in the 1980s. She interweaves her narrative with a bunch of observations about the rise of Nazism in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, but her analogies - like how the Nazis used the term "homeland" - are odd. To analogize the current American leadership to Soviet leaders is ironic, given which side so many of the necons of the 1980s were on (compared to the author)

It seems that Wolf should stick with what she knows - beauty, lifestyle, and what colors Al Gore should wear to appeal to women like her. When she gets into the national security sandbox, her arguments are not convincing. Are Americans truly at risk at being swept off the streets and held incommunicado at the say-so of the President, with no right to legally challenge their detention? How many Americans have suffered this fate? ZERO. Hamdi? Padilla? Al Masri? There are legal opinions discussing their detention. Lindh? He was prosecuted in the American criminal justice system. Oh, and Padilla was as well.

I agree that things are not good right now, but I disagree with Wolf on the identification of the problems. That books like this one can generate so many positive reviews shows that we indeed live in dangerous times.