Book Review: America Alone - The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn

If you're familiar with the work of Mark Steyn, there's probably no need to read this review. You either love him or you hate him - no one is ambivalent about his provocative, thought-provoking, and bitingly funny newspaper and magazine columns.

If you aren't familiar with his work, his book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It is pretty much the same as his essays, only more so. (Much of his work can be read at his website.) My description of his work as "provocative, thought-provocative, and bitingly funny" should tip you off to how I feel about Steyn, and needless to say, I devoured America Alone in near-record time.

Steyn's thesis, a recurring feature in his post-9/11 columns (many of which have been incorporated into the text of America Alone), is that cultural trends - particularly, heavy immigration from predominantly Muslim countries - are changing Europe almost beyond recognition:

...much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands - probably - just as in Istanbul there's still a building known as Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate.

To put it succinctly, the birth rate among European Muslims is much higher than that of the dominant culture, so a major population shift seems almost inevitable. This would not be a problem, except that Europe's young Muslims ("youths" as they are inevitably described in news stories about rioting in the French suburbs) are more alienated and radicalized than their parents and even their youthful co-religionists in predominantly Muslim countries.

Worst of all, the people of Europe - including the established Christian churches - have lost all confidence in their own cultures. This is not seen as a sign of sensitivity or openness by Islamic radicals, unfortunately, but a sign of weakness. "If you're a teenager in most European cities these days," writes Steyn, "you've a choice between two competing identities - a robust confident Islamic identity or a tentative post-nationalist cringingly apologetic European identity."

The United States is the exception to this disturbing trend, according to Steyn. (Hence the title, America Alone.) But it would be short-sighted to assume the great boogeyman of "globalization" is allowing American culture and values to run roughshod over the rest of the world, as the Adbusters crowd would have you believe. On the contrary: the Saudis have poured billions of dollars in oil money into promoting their strict, intolerant, and violent strain of the Islamic faith all over the world.

Article Author: Damian Penny

Damian J. Penny, originally from Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, is a lawyer in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. From 2001 until 2009, he was the proprietor of one of Canada's most popular right-of-centre political blogs, Daimnation!

Visit Damian Penny's author page — Damian Penny's Blog