A brilliantly developed study of the loss of public opportunities and civic solidarity, and their replacement by a market-driven ethos that commodifies our longings and exalts the selfish and encapsulated will of isolated individuals. Public Spaces, Private Lives is Henry Giroux's most fascinating work to date-and, the most profoundly energizing. Giroux repeatedly has brought his formidable intellect to bear on issues that immediately matter to ordinary men and women. He enters the moral battles of our era in the cultural locations-film, the press, TV-in which they actually are waged. This is why Giroux has come to be a public force of critical importance-an importance certain to be magnified by this deliciously irreverent and iconoclastic work. A brave book by a brilliant man with a big heart and a shrewd eye for the cruelties and contradictions of our paradoxical society.

Jonathan Kozol, National Book Award winner and author of "Savage Inequalities" and "Death at an Early Age"

Henry Giroux's Public Spaces, Private Lives is both a continuation and a significant contribution to his work of recent years, in which he addresses the criminalization of youth, the role of education in civic participation, and the possibilities of radical democracy from a broad-ranging critical pedagogy and cultural perspective. This collection of essays is especially relevant - even critically important - after 9/11: Giroux begins with the claim that cynicism has been and continues to be a driving force in American political culture, a force that understands both critique and social-political action as futile. He argues for a new or resurrected 'language of resistance and possibility' that will culminate in what he calls 'educated hope,' a kind of utopianism based on a practical social vision.

College Literature

Public Spaces, Private Lives appears at a time of seismic reversals that are occurring in the public sphere. While written before September 11th, the book has far more significance since that event. This book marks a new phase in Giroux's intellectual trajectory.

Teachers College Record