Words on Fire is startling, powerful and alarming. Read this review, get the book.
Fred takes on one of the most frightening topics we are beginning to face in our culture and in other cultures: the use of incendiary language as a radicalizing tool in America’s public discourse. I’ve known Fred for more than 35 years and we’ve worked together, collaborated, shared and admired each other’s ideas.
Words on Fire is a very important book.
Words on Fire should be mandatory reading and a guidebook for every journalist, editor, business school, religious leader, and elected official. Important institutions in our society and culture have the affirmative responsibility to stand up and speak out against the users and use of dangerous language.
Words on Fire is the script for speaking out.
Like Rules for Radicals, published 40 years ago but still vital, Words on Fire should become a handbook for a personal and cultural movement to detect, expose, alert and trigger powerful counteraction to confront incendiary language and those who use it whenever and wherever provocativity and provocateurs emerge.
It is also core knowledge for activists, social change agents, and those planning to overthrow dictators, tyrants, and truly bad leaders.
Over the years I have learned and practiced hundreds of lessons and insights from Fred. I hope Words on Fire will draw attention to the help he can provide to our culture, wounded by the intentional incompetence, vilification and vengeance which occurs daily from America’s current leaders.
Decency, civility, and integrity have many enemies these days and like so many examples from the past, we seem to be sitting back and letting cultural disintegration happen.
Fred’s approach, in the simplest of terms, demonstrates the myth we all learned as children: that while sticks and stones may break our bones, words will never hurt us. We learned this at five, found out it was a lie at six when we were publicly humiliated by somebody we didn’t know in the school yard. We learned that broken bones will heal, but that insults, meanness and humiliation, disrespect and shaming, indecency and incivility leave bloodless, invisible and often permanent and irreversible undetectable scars… on our soul.
Fred’s first warning message is powerful yet simple: terminate the senseless supremacist tendencies that if permitted to continue will destroy our democracy. It is time to return our culture and our democracy to their fundamental promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I am really looking forward to that. Thank you, Fred.
