A revealing, intellectual, and social portrait of today's most influential political movement.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Contrary to widespread belief, neoconservatives generally support the welfare state as providing an essential safety net, though neocons such as Irving Kristol and Michael Novak want to restructure welfare programs in order to limit bureaucracy, maximize personal autonomy and discourage a cycle of dependency. This viewpoint emerges from Gerson's survey of neoconservative thought, based on his interviews with Kristol, Novak, Norman Podhoretz, James Q. Wilson, William Buckley Jr., Midge Decter, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Richard John Neuhaus, Joshua Muravchik and other leading neo- and old-line conservatives. Despite a wide diversity of opinions, there is much common ground; neoconservatives oppose affirmative action; they regard capitalism as essential to economic and moral prosperity and view communist systems as evil; pro-choice neoconservatives think abortion is wrong and should be stringently regulated and discouraged, while many Catholic neocons go further, opposing legalized abortion, which they regard as murder. Even readers who disagree with neoconservative philosophy will find much to ponder in Gerson's thoughtful intellectual history.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Readers who wish to learn more about the neoconservative movement should turn to Gerson's excellent, informative history. (Library Journal )
Gerson has written an invaluable guide to a group--the neoconservative intellectuals--that confuses and irritates both paleo-conservatives and left-liberals. (Robert K. Bork )
A definitive work of scholarship. (Frum, David )
The best play-by-play account to date of the neocons' ferocious battles with the dominant (liberal) culture. (Wall Street Journal )
A serious, well-written and well-researched book about an important subject. (The New Republic )
Even readers who disagree with neoconservative philosophy will find much to ponder in Gerson's thoughtful intellectual history. (Publishers Weekly )
Gerson has written an invaluable guide to a group--the neoconservative intellectuals--that confuses and irritates both paleo-conservatives and left-liberals. (Robert K. Bork )
A definitive work of scholarship. (Frum, David )
The best play-by-play account to date of the neocons' ferocious battles with the dominant (liberal) culture. (Wall Street Journal )
A serious, well-written and well-researched book about an important subject. (The New Republic )
Even readers who disagree with neoconservative philosophy will find much to ponder in Gerson's thoughtful intellectual history. (Publishers Weekly )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Very Informative But a Drag to Read,
By
This review is from: The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Paperback)
Whether you are a liberal or a conservative should have no basis for whether or not you liked or disliked this book. If you are a liberal, there is plenty to learn about the traitors to the right and if you are an old conservative you can learn about the right's relatively new allies, or if you are a neo-con you can learn plenty about the movement that you claim to be a part of. This book provides more than enough information about everything neoconservative. However the books failing comes in the way that the information was presented. It is very obvious that Gerson was an inexperienced writer when he wrote this book, still being in graduate school. The rhetoric that he uses is unimaginative and overall sometimes painful to read. He employs constant use of sentence fragments and other grammer-nazi anathemas. However the books biggest failing is simple: it is often very hard to connect two events in the book. Now bear with me here, this is a bit hard to explain. Basically the first hundred or so pages are about liberal anti-communists, now as you may or may not know the liberal anti-communists are those that would later become the neo-conservative movement. Then he says that the liberal anti-communists abandonned the left. He writes a total of 5 or 6 pages about this. Basically he doesn't provide many concrete reasons for the switch or how the switch occured. He merely said that it happened and I was only able to discern this based on the bolded titles of the two sections that dealt with the conversion. Thus although this book is very informative about some things about the new conservative movement, it muddles some of the most important events and is written in an amateurish, aspiring tongue.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pedantic and Horribly Written,
By Amazon Lady (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Paperback)
This book is painfully tedious to read, though I may not be an out of touch, ivory tower intellectual scheming behind closed university doors on how to bring democracy to the world through the barrel of a gun in order to impose my products on them. Like other neocons, Gerson is now capitalizing on his ideas by connecting contacts to new markets, forged through blood baths. Gerson is a terrible writer -- there is very little new or intersting in this book, which cannot be acquired elsewhere -- as a reviewer said, on the web for free. I would read the Nation's "Men from JINSA" to understand the movement or even Al Regnery's Upstream, which places the neoconservative movement within the context of the wider conservative movement. This book reads like a poorly written PhD thesis, which was sloppily put together after a night of partying by a self-important twit who was convinced of his superiority and genius by virtue of belonging or somehow finding membership in the neocon movement. This book was written to cement Gerson's neocon ties/credentials to help promote his future financial aspirations. The five star review(s) -- both by the same person, were probably written by Gerson himself, or Bill Kristol, or some other neocon punk who enjoys this pedantic, poorly written drivel.
7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Fawning interviews with leading neo-cons,
By Dr. Henry Lloyd (Biloxi, Mississippi) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars (Paperback)
The access and interviews that Gerson got are moderately impressive, but the trade-off is that there is little origional or interesting in this collection. You can find similer content on the web for free, that is what I suggest you do instead of buying this book.
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