Three reviews
Professor Jeremy Rabkin reviews Mark Steyn's America Alone in the new issue of the Weekly Standard. His review is "Vive la caliphate." Professor Rabkin mostly summarizes the argument of Steyn's book. Here is Professor Rabkin warming to the task:
It's human nature to recoil from the saddest or most distressing sights. If there's another side of us that is fascinated by disaster, there are lots of disaster stories competing for attention. Cable news and the Internet make it all too easy to switch over or click on to the latest breaking tale of woe. To keep us focused on the most alarming underlying trends, we need a really entertaining writer.Tomorrow's New York Times Book Review carries two reviews of special interest. The first is George Will's review of Michael Lewis's The Blind Side. Lewis's book is about "the salvation of Michael Oher, a black child virtually raised on the mean streets of Memphis." Oher is saved by his adoptive family (Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy and their kids) and his athletic gifts. Will's review is profoundly disturbing. Oher attends Ole Miss on a football scholarship:So here's Mark Steyn, with all his trademarked verbal slapstick and clowning. And his new book is intensely sobering. Most of it has been said before--and by no one more insistently than Steyn himself in his regular columns in America, Canada, and Britain. But with the space now to keep spinning out the implications, Steyn offers a warning that is riveting.
Oher was not a whale out of water at Ole Miss. Lewis says that the typical football player in Michael’s college class “had third-grade-level reading skills. Several had never taken math. Ever.” Michael’s three closest friends among his Ole Miss teammates had children. One had become a father at 15. Michael brought a teammate, Quentin Taylor, to the Tuohys’ home for Thanksgiving, and Taylor mentioned that he had fathered three children by two different mothers. Lewis writes:Also worth reading is James Kaplan's review of Art Buchwald's "deathbed memoir" Too Soon to Say Goodbye. Buchwald committed himself to a hospice and prepared to die, yet he has unaccountably survived. Reading the review brought back warm memories of my dad's enjoyment of Buchwald's columns, but, given the difficulty of visiting a dying friend, I was especially interested in the list of those who called on Buchwald in the hospice:“Leigh Anne pulled the carving knife from the turkey and said, ‘Quentin, you can do what you want and it’s your own business. But if Michael Oher does that I’m cutting his penis off.’ From the look on Quentin’s face Michael could see he didn’t think she was joking.”She probably wasn’t. She and Sean seriously, ferociously, implacably care about Oher. They were the first adults to do so.
The guests ranged from old schoolmates to the columnist’s many high-octane friends — the likes of Tom Brokaw and Ben Bradlee and Ethel Kennedy and Russell Baker and Jack Valenti and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as John Glenn, the queen of Swaziland and the commandant of the United States Marine Corps. “It is amazing,” Buchwald says, “how many people visit if you are in a convenient location and they’ve been told you’re going to die.”
