Monday, May 22, 2006
I'm not finished with it yet, but I can already issue a hearty recommendation for Bruce Bawer's, While Europe Slept : How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within
Bawer, a gay expat American who moved to Norway with his partner some years ago writes about watching Europe slip. Once a fairly typical-sounding liberal, originally looking for a life among the more enlightened Europeans, he has come to appreciate American swagger, and America. The book is a flowing read and covers many of the topics blog readers will be familiar with and it does so in a concise manner.
Written before the latest "cartoon controversy," readers will recognize some foreshadowing. Here, on the fallout from Theo Van Gogh's Submission:
I wish I could give copies of this book out to every household in Europe and the US.
I was going to write a whole spiel about how odd the responses to this book have been from the right and the left. However, I've decided that the best prospect is to give it a thumbs-up and to recommend it to anyone, liberal or conservative, who is concerned about the threat of Islamic radicalism and leftist multiculturalism in the West. Bruce is a great writer, a superb intellect, and a nice guy. Really, along with Camille Paglia, Andrew Sullivan, and Norah Vincent, he's one of the smartest cultural commentators out there, gay, straight, or whatever. I very much like seeing the borders between queer/straight and left/right broken down by smart, aware people. (He's a wonderful literary critic, too--almost the equal of the astonishing Cynthia Ozick, by the way.)
Real page turner. Unfortunately, it is all anecdotes, very little date about numbers or trends - probably because little exists. European social scientists are too politically correct to ask the hard quesiotns. So all we get is stories - but what stories!
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=22563