The <i>Times</i> alone by Stefan Beck

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Feb 05, 2007 07:06 PM

The <i>Times</i> alone

by Stefan Beck

The New Criterion noted in November 2006: “As we go to press, The New York Times Book Review hasn’t yet deigned to notice [Mark Steyn’s America Alone]. Will they?” Months later, they still haven’t. This is peculiar enough given that the book made in onto the Times’s own nonfiction bestseller list, and that it has been reviewed in dozens of other publications. But it’s downright embarrassing when you consider some of the influential people who have given it their attention.

In another conversation, he told me that he was reading “America Alone,” a book by the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, which argues that Europe is succumbing, demographically and culturally, to an onslaught by Islam, leaving America friendless in its confrontation with Islamic extremism.

“The thing I quote most from it is the power of demographics, in Europe particularly,” [he] said. “That’s what struck me the most. But the other part is a kind of confirmation of what I know and what I’ve read elsewhere, which is that Islamist extremism has an ideology, and it’s expansionist, it’s an aggressive ideology. And the title I took to mean that we Americans will have ultimate responsibility for stopping this expansionism.”

That’s none other than Joseph Lieberman, subject of this profile in the New Yorker. The Times must know something he doesn’t.