Bill Bradley to Discuss "The New American Story
Posted on April 09, 2007

Former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley will discuss and sign his new book, The New American Story at 4 p.m. April 13 at UCLA's Faculty Center.

Bradley served in the U.S. Senate from 1979 to 1997 and was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. President in 2000. Prior to his career in politics, he was a professional basketball player with the New York Knicks. He also was an Olympic gold medalist (basketball) at the 1964 Olympic games in Tokyo. In 1982 he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

The former Rhodes Scholar currently hosts a weekly satellite radio program titled, "American Voices," and is currently a managing director of Allen & Company LLC. He has written several books including Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir and Values of the Game, and is a New York Times bestselling author.

Exerpt from The New American Story

“If we get beneath the surface of [the] story we’re being told [about America], we see that it doesn’t embody the ‘rugged individualism’ that built this country, or the high aspirations John Winthrop had for the Puritans’ New World as ‘a city upon a hill,’ or the spirit of tolerance that permeated the founding of Rhode Island by Roger Williams and Pennsylvania by William Penn, or the selfless feeling of community that Alexis de Tocqueville caught in his descriptions of early nineteenth-century America. It is none of these things. It is, rather, a story about war, inequality, pollution, corruption, and hyperindividualism that plays out every day in the news. Instead of being blunt, experimental (forward-looking), egalitarian, and optimistic, as we were throughout our history, we are being presented as manipulative, predictable, obsessed with wealth and preoccupied with all the bad things that could happen to us. Is this a true story about you, or me?” (excerpt from The New American Story)