How long does it take to read Achieving Our Country?
Achieving Our Country by Richard Rorty takes about 3 hours 3 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 3 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1998. 166 pages, about 45,650 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 4 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 3 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 54 minutes |
The page count is the median across 2 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
How have national pride and American patriotism come to seem an endorsement of atrocities - from slavery to the slaughter of Native Americans, from the rape of ancient forests to the Vietnam War? Achieving Our Country traces the sources of this debilitating mentality of shame in the Left, as well as the harm it does to its proponents and to the country. At the center of this history is the conflict between the Old Left and the New that arose during the Vietnam War. Richard Rorty describes how the paradoxical victory of the antiwar movement, ushering in the Nixon years, encouraged a disillusioned generation of intellectuals to pursue "High Theory" at the expense of considering the place of ideas in our common life. In the absence of a vibrant, active Left, the views of intellectuals on the American Right have come to dominate the public sphere. This galvanizing book, adapted from Rorty's Massey Lectures of 1997, takes the first step toward redressing the imbalance in American cultural life by rallying those on the Left to the civic engagement and inspiration needed for "achieving our country."
Subjects: History, Radicalism, Right and left (Political science), Radicals, Radicalisme, Toekomstverwachtingen
