America Alone

612 of 651 people found the following review helpful: "Some light reading for the new Dark Ages", September 25, 2006
Reviewer:
David McCune "self-deprecating and proud of it" (Tacoma, WA) - See all my reviews At least, that's how he signed my copy. I'd call Mark Steyn's essay the single best distillation of the challenge posed to the West by radical Islam that I have ever read. Regular readers of Mr. Steyn will not be unfamiliar with his central points: 1) In the ongoing conflict between the West and Islam, both the demographics and the will to power favor the Islamists. That a country like Spain, with a birth rate of 1.15 children per adult women, will extinguish itself in a few generations, while immigrants from countries such as Pakistan (birth rate 4.53) will move in to fill the vacuum. 2) That as an aggressive, unassimilated minority edges closer to a majority (as in France, with an estimated 30% Muslim population in the under 20 age group), the character of the democratic institutions will become more closely aligned with Islamic law and culture. 3) That the post-Christian welfare state is largely to blame for the pessimism and failures of will demonstrated by Europe. 4) That America represents the primary exception to this trend, if only by degree, and that only a concerted effort to save our society stands a chance of reversing these trends. That's a reasonable précis of Steyn's book, and he is certainly not unique in either his diagnosis or his prescription for the West. What sets this apart is his writing. The argument is made in a way that is the most engrossing and entertaining presentation of these ideas I've ever read. Steyn, as part of his superhuman writing regimen, is the obituarist for The Atlantic Monthly, and he puts that talent on display. This is not just a description of a set of demographic realities, but a loving, if premature (he hopes), obituary to a dying great culture. It's Steyn's ability to blend humor with the terminal diagnosis that sets him apart. Take the following, from letting the book fall open at random (pages 60-61), where Steyn weaves together these seemingly disparate ideas: a photo of Lincoln with his future assassin in near proximity, the globalization at the root of a bird flu scare ("Any minute now there would be toxic cockatoos over the white cliffs of Dover, and the East End would be reeling under a blitzkrieg of sneezing parakeets"), the Black Death in Europe in the 1340s, the exportation of radical Islam from the Bedouin to the West, and finally a quote for Dean Martin's old nightclub act. I can't even describe it adequately; Steyn actually pulls it off, brilliantly.