New at Heyday | About Heyday | Catalog | Magazines | How to Order | Contact Us
Back to History of the West | Back to Literary Anthologies

Each A Mighty Voice:
A Century of Speeches from The Commonwealth Club of California

Edited by Steven Boyd Saum, Preface by Gloria Duffy, Foreword by Kevin Starr
Cloth, ISBN: 1-890771-87-2, $24.95

Published in collaboration with the Commonwealth Club of California

The Commonwealth Club, the nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum, has hosted presidents, national and world leaders, policymakers, leading lights in the arts and sciences and countless celebrities, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt in 1911. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you may have attended its events. Outside the Bay Area, you have likely heard of The Commonwealth Club of California from its radio broadcasts, which are now carried on more than two hundred commercial and public radio stations, reaching half a million people weekly throughout the country.

Heyday Books is proud to present this centennial collection of speeches delivered at The Commonwealth Club.

Rich with ideas, sweeping in scope, Each a Mighty Voice immerses you in the anguish, excitement, and fears of the last century: not as history, but as present tense.

Each a Mighty Voice lets the reader get past the sound bites of modern political campaigns to take a real lesson in civic leadership—not from a partisan pundit, political maven, or policy wonk, but from our leaders themselves. Here are the ideas that have shaped our century, and the words that have brought us here.

Reviews:

"Each a Mighty Voice should be required reading for every political candidate, public spokesperson, and business leader. Herein are the speeches of our times…the great words that have guided America, as well as the demagoguery that nearly derailed her from time to time."—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Thousand Secret Senses

"If you’ve got something of interest to say, The Commonwealth Club is interested in hearing it—as Each a Mighty Voice proves in spades. Where else would you find speeches delivered by Joe McCarthy and Joan Baez, FDR and Dan Quayle, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan? In a political atmosphere polluted by bias, bile, and bellicosity, The Commonwealth Club stands as a beacon of openness, evenhandedness, and civility."—Arianna Huffington, syndicated columnist and author of Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America

"A unique compilation of speeches with great relevance for the challenges we face today. This splendid volume reminds us that of all the blessings a society may have, leadership is the most essential."—Senator Richard G. Lugar, Chair, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

"I’ve always felt that you could write a history of American life throughout the past century by drawing on the rich and evocative words of the many important leaders and thinkers who have spoken before The Commonwealth Club of California. This book proves it, and it will show those who don’t already know why the Club is a national treasure."

—Michael Beschloss, historian and author of The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany

"If Martians landed on this planet and wanted to find out what life was like in the twentieth century, this would be the treatise. This is a must-read for all people on earth and beyond."—Mickey Hart, percussionist and music preservationist

About the Editor:

Steven Boyd Saum is Editor-in-Chief for the Commonwealth Club of California. A graduate of Emory University and Johns Hopkins, he has also served in the U.S. Peace Corps, hosted a radio show, and directed the Fulbright Program in Ukraine. His essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared on Salon.com and in the Kenyon Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere.