Sissy Nation or The Different Drum

Sissy Nation: How America Became a Culture of Wimps & Stoopits

Author: John Strausbaugh

Praised by The New York Times Book Review for being “persuasive [and] provocative,” John Strausbaugh reveals in furious, funny, and ferocious strokes how Americans became sissified, soft, and scared—and offers us unforgettable solutions on how to snap out of it. The American Sissy cocoons in a safe, virtual world— Fundadome. He plays with online friendsters and he plays with himself, anything to abate the growing anxiety about everything from terrorists to sex and spinach, air and water. He votes for sissy leaders, who lash out at the world like bullies—sissies in tough-guy drag. He’s so afraid of death and illness he doesn’t really live; he medicates and analyzes. And he’s so busy following the lives of the rich and famous that he has no time to have a rich and fulfilled life of his own. “I don’t mean sissy as girly man versus manly man,” Strausbaugh says. “This is not about big biceps. It’s about shrinking balls. And unless we stop acting like such sissies, soon enough some lean, angry barbarians from somewhere out Beyond Fundadome are going to overrun us, ramming their bayonets in our fat guts like fingers poking the Pillsbury Doughboy, and we won’t  be giggling.”

Strausbaugh leaves no sacred cow untipped. He is  as non-partisan as he is a straight shooter, taking equal aim at Democrats and Republicans, gays and straights, PETA fanatics, and the Christian right. But all is not  lost. Sissy Nation offers “modest proposals” for getting back the gumption that made this culture great.

See also: Video Demystified or Final Cut Pro 4 for Dummies

The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace

Author: M Scott Peck

In The Different Drum, the next step, the next challenge, the next journey is presented: to achieve, through the creative experience of community, a new "connectedness" and wholeness.

Publishers Weekly

An advocate of a supranational government agency to replace obsolete nation-states and transformation of the military into a national service corps, psychiatrist Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, etc., argues that physical and spiritual salvation no longer can be separated. The only way to combat the public apathy and ``militant ignorance'' that allow the arms race to continue lies in grass-roots propagation of the community ideal, which the church and government have lost, argues the author. Individualism plus groupand self-acceptance, good communication and joint commitment are essential to building a true community whatever its membership and interests. Peck foresees a new era of integration favorable to a community movement that calls for universal application of the personal principles of tolerance and love. Renouncing both policies of appeasement and deterrence, he proposes a ``peace through weakness'' strategy that dares us to ``empty'' ourselves of outmoded ideas of security to the extent of facing the economic consequences of eliminating the arms race. Major ad/promo. (June 2)

Library Journal

In his newest book psychiatrist Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled ( LJ 9/15/78), explores the nature of community, which can be recognized, he suggests, by the vulnerability, honesty, and theological cultural inclusiveness of its participants. Born of a yearning for world peace, this draws exciting analogies between the ways communities emerge and the dynamics of individual spiritual development. A moving work that achieves a rich integration of social/psychological insights and a contemplative stance. EC