Pell, Eve. The Big Chill: How the Reagan Administration, Corporate America, and Religious Conservatives Are Subverting Free Speech and the Public's Right to Know. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. 269 pages.

Eve Pell is a West Coast journalist who writes for progressive publications. In this book she chronicles the anti-free speech climate of the early Reagan years, and how this has affected a broad spectrum of Americans. Her book has four main sections: 1) the federal government as censor (the Executive Order on Classification, Antileak Directive NSDD 84, the weakened FOIA, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the courts, and encroachments on science and high tech); 2) censorship in schools, libraries, and business (book banning and pornography censorship on the right and left); 3) libel (the use of libel law by the powerful to harass the weak); and 4) suppression of dissent (Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, unleashing the IRS and other agencies, and conservative public interest legal foundations).

Pell performs a service by warning us that tolerance in America is on the decline, and accurate when she sees this as a problem on both the left and right, from the national government all the way to the local level. Eight years later the problem is more serious because of an ailing economy that decreases the choices we have, the increasing monopoly of the major media, and the deterioration of the educational system.
ISBN 0-8070-6161-1

This book was recently listed at UsedBookCentral.com

Search the NameBase site: While the best way to search for names is to use NameBase, most can also be found here by using only first and last name, separated by a single space, with no quotation marks.
Free document software

Name index for Pell,E. The Big Chill. 1984

try a NameBase search          home page          register