The Neoconservative Persuasion, Selected Essays, 1942–2009 By Irving Kristol; edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb Basic Books, 2011; 390 pages, $29.95 There aren’t very many neoconservatives anymore. It’s a label that serves no purpose except to identify evil-doing and evil-thinking. So now’s the time to assess the achievements and the failures of what we must say, at […]
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From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation Mitch Pearlstein Rowman & Littlefield, 2011; 165 pages, $50.00 On January 12, 2012, CNN News ran a headline, “Forced To Wear Sign: Dynesha Lax ‘I Lie, I Steal, I Sell Drugs.’”The story leads off: The mother of a troubled 14-year-old […]
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Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought Scott Yenor Baylor University Press, 2011; 430 pages, $39.95 Scott Yenor wastes no time in getting to the point. The political science professor at Boise State University writes in the opening chapter of this book: “Modern individuals see themselves as persons independent of unchosen duties […]
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Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 Charles Murray Crown Forum, 2012; 407 pages, $27 Members of the notorious Baby Boom generation, including many like this reviewer who were born in the 1950s and reached adolescence in the 1960s, know from personal experience that the America they are passing on to their twenty-something children […]
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Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin Edited by Deborah Satz and Rob Reich Oxford University Press, 2009; 260 pages, $85.00 In that attractive but rather closed community known as American higher education, feminists own a lot of real estate. The small number of courses in “women’s studies” in the 1960s […]
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Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men Mara Hvistendahl Public Affairs, 2011; 314 pages, $26.99 This brave and timely book has many strengths and one glaring, but understandable, weakness. The strength of this book is the reporting. Mara Hvistendahl, a liberal, pro-choice feminist, painstakingly documents the catastrophic […]
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America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb: How the Looming Debt Crisis Threatens the American Dream— and How We Can Turn the Tide Before It’s Too Late Peter Ferrara Broadside Books/Harper Collins, 2011; $25.99, 432 pages When he wrote The Foes of Our Household in 1917, Theodore Roosevelt noted that “reforms are excellent, but if there is nobody […]
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Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker Oxford University Press, 2010; 312 pages, $24.95 Although written two centuries ago, the novels of Jane Austen remain a fascination with many young adults living on this side of the Atlantic. It is hard to imagine a […]
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Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys Kay S. Hymowitz Basic Books, 2011; 284 pages, $25.99 A couple of months ago, the Yale chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon was suspended for its members’ behavior during pledge week. Pledges, many of them blindfolded, shouted out chants to their female classmates such […]
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Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State William Voegeli with a foreword by Steven F. Hayward Encounter Books, 2010; 327 pages, $30.50 Government Is the Problem: Memoirs of Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Reformer Robert B. Carleson, Edited by Susan A. Carleson and Hans A. Zeiger American Civil Rights Union, 2009; 160 pages, $25.00 If the American Conservative, National Review, and […]
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