Privacy

Body scans at the airport, bikini pics on Facebook, a Twitter account for your stray thoughts, and a surveillance camera on every street corner - today we have an audience for all of the extraordinary and banal events of our lives. The threshold between privacy and disclosure becomes more permeable by the minute. But what happens to our private selves - indeed, the people who we truly are - when our public personas are left on? In this brilliant, penetrating addition to the Big Ideas/small books series, Garret Keizer considers the moral dimensions of privacy in relation to "choice" and "equality." Choice not only protects us from violation but also allows social intercourse to be dignified, beautiful, and interesting. At the same time, privacy is most voluntary between persons of equivalent power. In Privacy, Keizer considers the evolution of the quintessentially American struggle to achieve it, which - along with the battles liberty and justice for all - has done much to define our recent history. From Greek and Elizabethan dramas to the histories of the ballot box, the love letter and the immense, over-crowded confessional of the Internet, he examines our ever-changing notions of privacy, all the while asking this central question: If we endanger privacy, do we not also threaten the fundamental nature of human relationships, our will to freely guard and reveal ourselves?

Garret Keizer is the author of six books, mostly recently of The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise. He is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, a contributing writer to Mother Jones, and a recent Guggenheim Fellow.

Praise for The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want

"Very few writers combine thoughtfulness and rage as satisfyingly as Garret Keizer….This is not just a book about noise; it is a profound meditation on power---its painful absence and its flagrant abuse."---Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine

"This is a masterpiece of social reportage and---wondrously, given all its burning indictments---of decency and affirmation."---Ron Powers, author of Mark Twain: A Life and coauthor of Flags of Our Fathers

"Garret Keizer’s argument goes off like an intellectual explosion….This is a book for our precise moment on earth."---Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet