Paul Hollander’s latest book is an understated, wry, and often hilarious collection of reflections on the profound link between anti-Americanism and the delusions and desires stirred up by modernity. Consumerism and the worship of celebrity, vain status-seeking and the artificial cult of youth—all symptoms of a society in irreversible decline—share a common root with the professed discontent of what could be called the educated ape. Hollander’s book is rich in fact and vivid, direct observation; a sociologist by profession, he practices something close to the nineteenth-century Tocquevillean variety of the discipline and eschews the abstruse theory, do-gooding mawkishness, and quantitative pedantry that plague his field and academe at large.

The Only Superpower contains many delights of the cringe-inducing variety; Hollander is a master at unveiling lame vanity, the psychologically dirty and suspect. One of his funn ...

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