ISSUES OF OUR TIME
Ours has been called an information age, but, though information has never been more plentiful, ideas are what shape and reshape our world. “Issues of Our Time” is a series of books in which some of today’s leading thinkers explore ideas that matter in the new millennium. The authors—including the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, the sociologist William Julius Wilson, the social psychologist Claude Steele, legal scholars Alan Dershowitz and Charles Fried, and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen—honor clarity without shying away from complexity; these books are both genuinely engaged and genuinely engaging. Each recognizes the importance not just of our values but also of the way we resolve the conflicts among those values. Law, justice, identity, morality, and freedom: concepts such as these are at once abstract and utterly close to home. Our understanding of them helps define who we are and who we hope to be; we are made by what we make of them. These are books, accordingly, that invite the reader to reexamine hand-me-down assumptions and to grapple with powerful trends. Whether you are moved to reason together with these authors, or to argue with them, they are sure to leave your views tested, if not changed. The perspectives of the authors in this series are diverse, the voices are distinctive, the issues are vital.
