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 funniest chapters is an analysis of the New York Review of Books personals ads. The legacy of the 1960s, with its false promise of individuality, originality, and self-fulfillment on the cheap, of community and freedom simultaneously achieved, is shown here in its tormenting, homogenous banality. The aspirations of the elite, socially atomized but interchangeable “individuals” reveal “an unexpected impression of uniformity, a standardization of cultural values, tastes, and ego ideals.” It’s all pasta for lunch and Mahler for dinner: a reduction of culture and life to the tedious mix-and-match randomness of lifestyle. The gap between the