Helen Andrews

Biographical sketches degenerate into essays and the book becomes much better when they do. Al Sharpton as the launching pad for transactional vs. transformational politics with revisionist history on political machines and racial integration was particularly insightful.

Despite her insistence that she found something to like in all of the individuals profiled Andrews clearly has nothing but antipathy for Sotomayor. Paglia, Jobs, and to a lesser degree Sorkin are all tragic in that their admirable qualities were perverted by their circumstance - their birth at the wrong time in the wrong country.

At times she undermines her own contention that the boomer disaster was avoidable. Pornography - nobody wanted it but nobody fought against it. School prayer - its staunch advocates within months decided it was unimportant, or actually good, that it was gone. Could pornography and the rollback of Christianity been stopped if the boomers' parents had been more alert to the danger? The true disaster is that we'll never know.

"If you've never belonged to something, you've never had to defend something, so you can hate everything."

"Teaching religion is like teaching a language - learn one language and you can learn another. Learn no language and you're a feral wolf boy forever."… (más)