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.
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.

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:

Oher was not a whale out of water at Ole Miss. Lewis says that the typical football player in Michael

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