Paul Goodman Boeken

Whether you're 65 and winding down or 30 and launching your career or somewhere in-between, the questions are the same. Am I living a good life? Am I accomplishing anything of value? Am I doing anything that will last? Is my life worthwhile? Deep within the heart of every man the desire to succeed and win. Not just in sports or career goals, but in all of life. The good news is you were made to finish well. You can reach the end of your life with a sense of satisfaction - not regret. Finishing well is attainable by all men - not just a few. Finishing well means the ability to ending your life with a profound sense of joy and peace, knowing you have led a meaningful and fulfilling life in achieving the goals placed before you by God. "The life circumstances in which you find yourself will most likely determine the setting in which you will live the remainder of your life. The blessing is that it doesn't make any difference where you are, what you are doing, what your health is, or how much your bank account holds - you can still finish well. Your life circumstances… won't determine if you finish well or not. Fortunately, finishing well is based on a decision you make and can be played out on almost any playing field or in any circumstance."

Focusing on the journey of Horatio, the narrative explores his thirty-year struggle as an idealist navigating a conformist society. The story delves into his quest for personal identity amidst societal pressures, highlighting themes of individuality, resilience, and the tension between personal beliefs and societal expectations.

Five years after his death in 1972, Paul Goodman was characterized by anarchist historian George Woodcock as “the only truly seminal libertarian thinker in our generation.” In this new PM Press initiative, Goodman’s literary executor Taylor Stoehr has gathered together nine core texts from his anarchist legacy to future generations. Here will be found the “utopian essays and practical proposals” that inspired the dissident youth of the Sixties, influencing movement theory and practice so profoundly that they have become underlying assumptions of today’s radicalism. Goodman’s analyses of citizenship and civil disobedience, decentralism and the organized system, show him Drawing the Line Once Again, mindful of the long anarchist tradition, and especially of the Jeffersonian democracy that resonated strongly in his own political thought. This is a deeply American book, a potent antidote to US global imperialism and domestic anomie.

First published 1951. A series of experiments in self-therapy designed to develop an awareness of self and a growth of the personality

Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly—he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things—and the book’s surprise success established him as one of America’s most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words. For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of the unhappiness of American society as a whole, run by corporations that provide employment (if and when they do) but not the kind of meaningful work that engages body and soul. Goodman saw the young as the first casualties of a humanly re­pressive social and economic system and, as such, the front line of potential resistance. Noam Chomsky has said, “Paul Goodman’s impact is all about us,” and certainly it can be felt in the powerful localism of today’s renascent left. A classic of anarchist thought, Growing Up Absurd not only offers a penetrating indictment of the human costs of corporate capitalism but points the way forward. It is a tale of yesterday’s youth that speaks directly to our common future.

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