This is an important book, not because it "exposes" the "hypocracy of the left". Such right-wing polemics are common, and usually worthless. In fact, it is by no means anti-left.

Unlike right-wing polemicists, who lose no opportunity to show their disgust of ideas such as black liberations, women's rights, or seperation of church and state, Ellis supports these ideas. His point is not that the IDEAS are "bad"--but that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Ellis argues that it is precisely BECAUSE the nominal goal of many leftist movements is so appealing that such organizations, in practive, become, first, beurocratic and inefficient, and finally tyrannical and cultic. Utopianism leads to extremism: if your goal is "make money", it's unlikely that you will kill millions to achieve it--it's not worth the trouble. But if your goal is "world peace forever", you just might: after all, what are the lives of a few people compared to this magnificent goal?

An excellent example, given by Ellis, is Bellamy's "Looking Backwards"--a look back, from the year 2000, which lives in utopian socialism, at all the capitalistic injustices of 1900. The "tiny" problem is that, in order to achieve this utopia, most of Bellamy's adherents were quite willing to commit murder and arson in order to get rid of the "evil capitalists". The DID succeed in doing that in Russia--but, of course, Bellamy's utopia never materialized.

This book is important because of the asymmetry between right and left extremism. The difference is not that the left extremists are essentially worse than the right extremists (Ellis notes, rightly, that it is Utopianism that is the problem--whether a "left-wing" or "right-wing utopia doesn't matter); it is that people are already aware that nazism and fascism weren't such hot ideas, and not too many are aware that the soft-spoken "liberal" professor in your local college town is working along the same lines....

The one problem with this book is that it takes the left too seriously. Unlike Russia before the revolution, the left in the US is, essentially, confined to college campuses and a few "enclaves" such as Greenwich Village and Berkeley. The risk of "totaliatarian thought control" by extremist academics is a problem for the tiny minority working in the humanities; not nice, but not exactly the same as life under Stalin or Hitler. Everybody else--from academics in business or science to the "average Joe"--can free themselves from these supposedly "powerful" organizations by simply ignoring them (which, incidentally, they do.)

Ellis, who IS part of this minority, naturally sees the threat very seriously; but becoming hysterical about the "evils of the politically correct university" can lead to the same extreme actions--only from the right--against anybody suspected of being a "radical leftist"; the same kind of witch-hunt that Ellis, rightly, abhors whether it is from the right or the left.

Loved it. Cheers, thanks a lot!

The remarkable capacity of mankind to hear what he wants to hear while disregarding the rest is as evident in the close mindedness of the Left as it is in the religious zealotry of the Right. Ellis does a fine job of bringing this compartmentalized brain syndrome condition into focus as he covers all the bases while uncovering the corruption of the various Liberal bastions. We need more intellectually honest social critics like Ellis to call the hand of the Tom Hayden's of the world. Anything to increase the speed of the pendulum as it continues its swing back toward the political middle. It can't happen soon enough

An interesting book to read as a companion piece to Ellis' book is "Damned Lies and Statistics" by Joel Best. In it he discloses the methods that institutional elite's, who would have their way with you, manipulate statistics to their gain and to your loss. H.G Wells predicted that the ability to think statistically would become as important, to citizens of a democracy, as the ability to read and write. In this statement he was, and is, correct.

Richard Ellis presents a wide-sweeping view of America's political cultures. It is an important work for scholars, but its usefulness has been diminished by its bibilographic approach. Placement of the notes at the end of the book and the lack of a bibliography detract from an otherwide interesting work.

... I was expecting a lot more from it. I think it is a shame that Portugal's anti-terrorist wars in Africa (Independence movements?? B.S!) where badly studied. And being portuguese, I could also sense some "white kaffir" mentality surfacing.
But the photos are quite good.
The book itself is little more of a colection of photos and some stories joined together without method.

This is, like most of Al J. Venter's stuff, a _MUST GET_ book.

In this collection of essays in honor of Professor Aaron Wildavsky you may found and interest approach the the cultural theory. Eventhough it is a very good compilation of about the relationship among culture and politics, it lacks of the relation culture-development, which must be seen as the forgotten piece in the definition of development models and theories in the next century. However this is a must read book for every political science student and for political scientis, politicians and academicians. but it need to be more developed the relation culture-development in order to understand why some nation develop better than others.