From former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles, a look at how some of the most educated people in America lost their minds – and how she almost did, too.
A slim collection of polemical reportage that I suspect is meant to be courageous stuff, also funny ... Where Wolfe was a precision-guided stiletto, Bowles is more of a dull blade, ridiculing her former colleagues by saddling them with laughably vacuous thoughts and dreams ... What’s frustrating about Bowles’s book is that there are usually better arguments in support of her case than the ones she bothers to make.
Attempts at scene-setting — a feeble homage to Didion’s magnificently visceral vignettes — fall flat ... The book’s ambient contempt for progressives is legible; its actual thesis much less so. Its chapters are short, flitting and digressive ... Morning After the Revolution is, at best, a grab bag of Bowles’s pet peeves ... She is not a liar or a peddler of outright misinformation, but she is fatally incurious about her ideological adversaries and their motivations. At no point does she exert any effort to understand the doctrines she is so quick to dismiss, and she turns a blind eye to examples of sane and effective progressivism, which are ample.
An astute, funny and splendidly written story of disillusionment ... In its depiction of dogmas gone awry, slavish conformism and malign thought-policing, Morning After the Revolution shows rather than tells the answer.
