PanThe Washington PostShapiro covers a lot of ground in fewer than 220 pages of text. However, as he lays out his historical survey, his case weakens when he nears the present day. He manages, in a single sweeping passage, to blame Karl Marx and New Left theorist Herbert Marcuse for a variety of modern social ills: pediatrician Benjamin Spock’s once-revolutionary precepts on child care, the insidious self-esteem of the Me Generation ... His message, which is a reductive gloss of intellectual history synthesized for easy digestion, seems primarily aimed at equipping his readers to lecture their friends and talk over their teachers ... the book claims that \'people need meaning,\' ... But Shapiro’s book, I’m afraid, would not have convinced me, if I weren’t already in that camp.
