Mark Steyn
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
Regnery, 256 pages, $27.95
reviewed by Victor Davis Hanson
The wider English-reading public discovered the genius of Mark Steyn after September 11, and for two reasons other than the fact that his amazing prolificacy did not come at the expense of quality.
First, he is funny in an understated way; indeed, he may be the most interesting satirist now writing in English. Consider a few quips from his latest volume about Westerners’ neurotic propensity to worry that we aren’t accommodating enough when we are already way beyond 1930s appeasement.[1] “The corpulent snorer in the La-Z-Boy recliner may have a beautifully waxed Ferrari in the garage, but he hates having to take it out on the potholed roads. Still, it looks mighty nice in the driveway when he washes it;” “The U.S. military hands each jihadist his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship the Times of London.”
Second, in this time of crisis in the Western world, Steyn is singularly unwavering and unaffected both by criticism and the blandishments of triangulation. Read Steyn each week of this long war, and there is no chance whatsoever that one will be surprised by a syrupy retraction, disguised as a “change of heart” or a “crisis of confidence”—those well-known embarrassing moments when a pundit suddenly learns he’s off the Washington A-list gravy train, and desperately
