Staying Power—Victor Davis Hanson

Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, by Natan Sharansky with Shira Wolosky Weiss (PublicAffairs, 304 pp., $26.95)

WHAT kept Natan Sharansky alive in the Soviet gulag, he tells us in his moving, against-the-grain new meditation on democracy, were two constants. One was his Jewishness: his notion of spiritual transcendence that he shared with other Jewish dissidents, his family, and his ancestors. Such distinctions made Sharansky a unique, rooted, and confident individual-a man with responsibilities to family and community beyond himself, a man capable of withstanding torture. But the other touchstone was his belief that there is a shared human desire for liberty: his intuition that in every man rests an innate need to express himself freely, protected by democratic institutions and constitutional government.

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Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, by Natan Sharansky with Shira Wolosky Weiss (PublicAffairs, 304 pp., $26.95)

WHAT kept Natan Sharansky alive in the Soviet gulag, he tells us in his moving, against-the-grain new meditation on democracy, were two constants. One was his Jewishness: his notion of spiritual transcendence that he shared with other Jewish dissidents, his family, and his ancestors. Such distinctions made Sharansky a unique, rooted, and confident individual-a man with responsibilities to family and community beyond himself, a man capable of withstanding torture. But the other touchstone was his belief that there is a shared human desire for liberty: his intuition that in every man rests an innate need to express himself freely, protected by democratic institutions and constitutional government.