Description: In the Spiritual Lives of Children and the Moral Intelligence of Children, the celebrated teacher and psychiatrist Dr. Robert Coles wrote about morals and ethics as they figure in the lives of children -- how character can be shaped in young people, and how they develop moral awareness. Now, in Lives of Moral Leadership, he discusses the moral life of adults as it develops by continued cultural exchange -- when, to borrow a phrase form Walker Percy, people "hand one another along", through mutual moral leadership.

Drawing on his life's experience -- in the American South during the civil rights movement, as a college and medical student, at Harvard, as psychiatrist -- Dr. Coles writes about moral leaders who influence him, to show how each of us can play a part in developing the moral fiber of our world. We are inspired by heroes, and also by the occasional call to BE a hero. Dr. Coles exhibits a stunning array of individuals whose moral leadership have impressed him over the course of years: some well-known, such as Dorothy Day and Robert Kennedy; some less well-knows, but well-respected, including teachers Warner Yaeger and Perry Miller; and others including a Boston Bus driver involved in the process of American desegregation; and Ruby Bridges, a young black girl who was among the first to integrate an all-white school in the 1960s, whose moral heroism inspired many. Moreover, Coles demonstrates how literature can prove a catalyst to moral action: Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Conrad.

The purpose of this book is two-fold -- both to provide moral examples of leaders as they figured in Coles' and in our everyday lives, and also to provoke and inspire moral leadership amongus.

Groundbreaking, thought-provoking, this is another must-read for those interested in the ways our moral selves are shape and transformed throughout our lives.

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