A Call to Heroism: Renewing America's Vision of Greatness - Softcover

Gibbon, Peter H.

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9780802140289: A Call to Heroism: Renewing America's Vision of Greatness

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802140289 ISBN 13: 9780802140289

Publisher: Grove Press, 2003

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In A Call to Heroism, Peter Gibbon argues that the heroes we honor are the embodiment of the ideals that America was founded on: liberty, justice, and tolerance chief among them. Because the very concept of heroism has come under threat in our cynical media age, Gibbon believes that we must forge a new understanding of what it means to be a hero to fortify our ideals as we engage our present challenges and face those that lay ahead. Gibbon examines the types of heroes that we have celebrated throughout our history, and along the way, he contemplates the meanings of seven monuments and artworks dedicated to heroes to examine what these places and things say about the America of their time—and what they mean for Americans today.

Full of insight and inspiration, A Call to Heroism is a provocative look at a timeless subject that has never been more important.
Chapter One What Is A Hero?
A look at the essence of heroism, and how we perceive it today

Interchapter: Hall of Fame for Great Americans
A contemplation of the Hall monument, built in New York City at the end of the 19th century by architecht Stanford White, and left to decay in the 1970s. Gibbon

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About the Author:

Peter H. Gibbon is a research associate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. In the last four years, he has traveled across the nation speaking to general audiences, to state and national education associations, and to students at over 150 schools in twenty states about heroism and heroic ideals for the twenty-first century.

From Publishers Weekly:

Is Michael Jordan a hero?... Lenny Bruce?... Why can't Charles Manson be a hero? These are among the questions teenagers pose to Gibbon when he addresses them on the subject of heroism. Gibbon, a research associate at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, answers in a series of brief reflections. Examining the writings of Emerson and Carlyle, the 19th century's premier thinkers on the subject, Gibbon extracts several characteristics of the hero: sincerity, persistence, intuition, austerity, bravery and virtue. He then defines a hero as a person of extraordinary achievement, courage, and greatness of soul. Reading through these lenses, Gibbon establishes his own hall of heroes, many not surprising: Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass; others more unexpected: Lucretia Mott, artist Kathe Kollwitz, educators Martha Berry and Horace Mann. He examines the models of the warrior-hero and the athlete-hero and their impact on American notions of the hero. Disgusted by the contemporary cult of celebrity, Gibbon asserts that celebrities lack the greatness of soul and moral vision that being a hero requires. Yet he explores with great candor the shortcomings of his own representative men and women. While Gibbon's enthusiasm for restoring the notion of heroism is admirable, his definitions are subjective and depend on the unlikely chance of our returning to a society like Emerson's in which values are commonly shared.
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