I'm confused by this book a lot. Apparently, you need to be a very mature critical thinker to separate objective and valid points from ad hominem attacks and other slendering techniques in this one. Because to my mind both approaches could be detected there. Yet I would certainly recommend it to everyone. To see a common and "holy" cause being skillfully (sometimes) attacked is priceless. You may like authors arguments or you may bitterly disagree, but you brain will be awaken and working at high revs.

This is a very neat book. Flynn takes to task certain theories that underpin the outlook of liberals in the world. For instance, the asinine theories of Foucault and Derrida are derided, as rightly they should be. Radical environmentalism and "animal rights" are hacked apart, though I wish that so-called "man-made global warming" were attacked for the political farce it is. Kinsey is shown to be a pervert who used "science" to justify his perversions (same goes for Foucault). Vidal, Zinn, and Chomsky are proven to be leftist hacks, not historians. Rogoberta Menchu is a hoax, Freidan a liar, Sanger a Social Darwinist of the Nazi sort, and W. E. B. DuBois a racist commie. All these folks are idiots, yet lionized by the Left (politically, socially, and intellectually). "Objectivism" of the Randian sort is proved to be not a form of conservatism, but a cult, with all its accompanying infelicities. Whittaker Chambers is shown to be a hero and Alger Hiss a Soviet spy and traitor to his country. Yet the school books still say he was caught up in the "Red Scare."

The only chapter I disagree with is the one on Strauss. Yes, Leo Strauss's idea of silences and meanings and quasi-numerology is inane, but to link it tenuously to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 is weak at best, downright fallacious at worst. True, maybe some conservatives and (gasp!) neo-cons (gasp! shreik!) are "intellectual followers" of Stauss, but the "bad guys" he mentions are certainly not: Dick Cheney, who he quotes to show Bush Administration duplicity, Colin Powell, and the like. George Tenet, appointed by the liberal Bill Clinton is probably not an evil "Straussian." And certainly the man at the top, George W. Bush, the guy who makes the final decisions, the "Decider-in-Chief," probably has no clue who Leo Strauss is. In fact, you probably mention Leo Strauss to him and he'll think blue jeans: "Levi Strauss." Bush is neither an "Intellectual" nor a "Moron." Weak, weak, weak. Probably added to show that Flynn wasn't a liberal basher.

Yet, this is what the book is about. How liberal ideologies, supposedly so much better than those based on Judaeo-Christian values and religions because it is based on "SCIENCE" (the Enlightenment run amok strikes again), create fundamentalists just as blind as Islamic terrorists or abortion-clinic bombers. Liberal intellectuals point to these theorists, shout "Science," and dismiss any critics as cretins (probably mouth-breathing Southern Baptists, no less). Perhaps I wax a bit tough on Libs, but I deal with them all the time as a Ph.D. student in history. Just last week I heard an anthropology professor cite Kinsey, a history prof I respect has a Chomsky quote outside his office door, and Foucault is worshiped as a god by many (right below Marx).

Somehow, I got my hands on a paperback uncorrected proof copy of this work. Hopefully in the original edition they added an index. ( )

Some of the yo-yos described in this book, such as Strauss, Marcuse, Derrida and Foucault are bores who cultivate a writing style sufficiently opaque that they can only appeal to pseudo-intellectual professors looking for a stylish horse to ride. Others, such as Alfred Kinsey, are sensational frauds who became heroes to journalists, always in need of another dose of tawdry trash to sell. Still others, such as Rigoberta Menchu and Betty Friedan, are activists who have serious problems with their autobiographies.

I enjoyed Flynn's rather amorphous collection of miscellany about these phonies, who have undoubtedly made some impact on the ruminations of the booboisee. They will inevitably sink into the oblivion they deserve, but probably not soon enough for most honest people. They will have plenty of company there. I remember being pulled into something of this sort as a young man. Who cares about existentialism these days? It is now sufficiently obscure that Flynn doesn't even include it. The time I wasted in reading this baloney in college is a real lesson for me. I could have been drinking beer or watching girls...

People of the Enlightenment have always had to contend with the ignorance and superstition of the masses, and have developed some pretty good tools to oppose the irrational and the nihilistic, dark side of the human beast. The more elevated phonies, the bishops and the professors of nonsense, have been mostly quite puny in their effect compared to the efforts of the scientists and engineers, with their fondness for numbers and graphs, replication, clarity and ceaseless experimentation. They progressively revealed a reality the nihilists cannot even imagine. The engineers have given us electricity and the automobile, the transistor and the internet. What have the phonies given us, aside from a raft of references in the Social Sciences Citation Index?

Flynn's debunking of these characters is fairly effective sometimes. Other chapters, such as the one on the Chambers-Hiss affair, should have been left out--it has already fallen into the abyss of irrelevance.

And I had always thought that The Kinsey Report was on the up and up. Flynn shows that it had an utter disregard for statistical sampling methods and was only an ax grinding, made up by a pervert. I especially enjoyed Flynn's rather lascivious treatment of Kinsey eccentricities--the ultimate ad hominem attack. Worth reading. ( )

Frightening! ( )