Ed Asner is a television legend, well known for his role as Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and subsequent spin-off Lou Grant. He is the winner of seven acting Emmy Awards, and has been nominated a total of twenty times. Asner also made a name for himself as a trade unionist and a political activist. He served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, from 1981-1985, during which he was an outspoken critic of former SAG President Ronald Reagan, then the US president, for his Central American policy. He is the co-author (with Ed Weinberg) of The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends the Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nut Jobs (Simon & Schuster). Ed Asner, a self-proclaimed dauntless Democrat from the old days, figured that if the right-wing wackos are wrong about voter fraud, Obama’s death panels, and climate change, they are probably just as wrong about what the Constitution says. On their way home from Philadelphia the people who wrote it couldn’t agree on what it meant. What was the president’s job? Who knew? In The Grouchy Historian, Ed Asner leads the charge for liberals to reclaim the Constitution from the right-wingers who use it as their justification for doing whatever terrible thing they want to do, which is usually to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. It’s about time someone gave them hell and explained that progressives can read, too. Booklist writes, “Although it is, indeed, wry and witty, Asner’s ‘defense’ is no mere entertainer’s polemic.”
