A Patriot's Handbook; Songs, Poems, Stories, and Speeches Celebrating the Land We Love

New York: Hyperion, 2003. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxiii, [1], 663, [1] pages. Illustrated endpaper. Illustrations. Index. Signed on the title page by Caroline Kennedy. Gift card presenting this signed first edition from Helen King Cummings to "Eugene", her attorney, dated December 10, 2003 laid in. Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born November 27, 1957) is an American author, attorney, and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Japan from 2013 to 2017. She is a member of the Kennedy family and the only surviving child of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Kennedy was five days shy of her sixth birthday when her father was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The following year, Caroline, her mother, and brother John F. Kennedy Jr. settled on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she attended school. Kennedy graduated from Radcliffe College and worked at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she met her future husband, exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg. She later earned a J.D. degree from Columbia Law School. Most of Kennedy's professional life has spanned law and politics, as well as education reform and charitable work. She has also acted as a spokesperson for her family's legacy and co-authored two books with Ellen Aldermanon on civil liberties. In 2013, President Obama appointed Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to Japan. Derived from a Publishers Weekly item: The rich and sometimes discordant strains of American self-scrutiny fill this wide-ranging anthology. Kennedy arranges the more than 200 selections according to themes like "The Flag," "Freedom of Speech," "Work, Opportunity and Invention" and "The Individual," and devotes equal space to the official, the devotional and the oppositional. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are reprinted in full, along with a large selection of presidential inaugurals and farewells and excerpts from landmark Supreme Court decisions. Popular songs include "Yankee Doodle," "This Land Is Your Land" and "Surfin' USA." Poems and fiction from such luminaries as Whitman, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Stephen Crane, Alice Walker and Annie Proulx explore the variegated textures of American life. The dissident voices of Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass hold America to account for its injustice; H.L. Mencken castigates it as "a commonwealth of third-rate men"; and Oscar Wilde raises a sardonic eyebrow at the whole dubious enterprise. Combining traditional touchstones of Americanism with many insightful surprises, Kennedy's thoughtful arrangement of works of historical significance and literary quality will reward both casual browsers and those conducting a more focused investigation of the nation's patriotic literature.