Customer Reviews

The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Communism is bad. Any movement that begins there is headed in the right direction. Since it began with that simple proposition a few decades back, the neoconservative movement has had more influence on the political landscape than most of us realize. Many conservatives of differing sorts may think of the neoconservatives as a small cadre of northeastern Jewish intellectuals irrelevant to other forms conservatism, or may not think of them at all, but will learn when reading Mark Gerson's book just how much other brands of conservatism should credit the neocons for shaping their theories and paving the way for the resurgence of genuine conservatism in America. Mark Gerson set out to write a book about great thinkers like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, and in doing so has put his name on a level with theirs.

Mark Gerson has illuminated an intellectual movement that carries the promise of freedom from the worn out structures of both traditional liberalism and conservatism. By capturing the essence of neoconservatism in a clearly written volume, he has done a great service to American political thought.