Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives

by Crispin Sartwell

Crispin Sartwell is Chair of Humanities and Sciences at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the author of several books, including most recently End of Toward an Annihilation of Language and History , also published by SUNY Press. His political writing appears in The Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , The Philadelphia Inquirer , and Harper's , among other outlets. He also writes a syndicated weekly opinion column.

Genres: Nonfiction

149 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

Crispin Sartwell was born 6.20.58 in DC. His Dad (and his and his) were DC newspapermen. His Mom and Step-pa were high school teachers and later organic farmers. He got kicked out of the public school system in tenth grade for fomenting revolution, and attended the New Education Project, aka Bonzo Ragamuffin Prep, then U Maryland, Johns Hopkins, UVA. He worked as a copy boy in 1980-81 at the Washington Star, where he started writing about pop music. He was a freelance rock critic through the eighties for, among others the Balt City Paper, Record Mag, High Fidelity, and Melody Maker.

He lives in Glen Rock, PA with his wife, the writer Marion Winik, and their five children. He's Visiting Associate Prof of Political Science at Dickinson College. He writes a weekly op-ed column, distributed by Creators Syndicate. He has also appeared in Harper's, the Washington Post, and on Weekend All Things Considered.

He is the author and editor of a number of books, and he's taught philosophy and communications at Vanderbilt, the Unversity of Alabama, and Penn State Harrisburg.

Reviews

[Logan · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can always count on Crispin Sartwell to provide a different perspective and unique opinion on things. Worth reading just for his style of prose.

[David Gross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sartwell explores “public virtue and moral character” by examining five of his heroes in “a kind of bootstrap operation in which the cardinal virtues of public figures emerge from the biographies, while the biographies themseves are in part constructed to display these same qualities.”

The five heroes he chose, an idiosyncratic collection, were Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Barry Goldwater, John Fire Lame Deer, and Malcolm X.