Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph

by Dennis Prager

Overview

Conservative radio host and syndicated columnist Dennis Prager provides a bold, sweeping look at the future of civilization with Still the Best Hope, and offers a strong, cogent argument for why basic American values must triumph in a dangerously uncertain world. Humanity stands at a crossroads, and the only alternatives to the “American Trinity” of liberty, natural rights, and the melting-pot ideal of national unity are Islamic totalitarianism, European democratic socialism, capitalist dictatorship, or global chaos if we should fail.  America is Still the Best Hope, as this eminently sensible, profoundly inspiring volume so powerfully proves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061985133
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/25/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	443
Sales rank:	301,907
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Dennis Prager is one of the most respected and influential thinkers, writers, and speakers in America. He is a nationally syndicated talk show host heard across the country on nearly 400 affiliates. He is the founder of Prager University (PragerU) and is a New York Times bestselling author of nine books. He has travelled to more than 130 countries and has lectured on all the world’s continents. An expert on communism, the Middle East, and the left, he did his graduate work at the Russian and Middle East Institutes of the Columbia University School of International Affairs. He taught Russian and Jewish history at Brooklyn College.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Why This Book 1

Introduction: Humanity at the Crossroads: The Future Will Be Leftist, Islamist, or American 7

Part I Leftism

Chapter 1 What Is Leftism? 21

Chapter 2 Why the Left Believes What It Believes 68

Chapter 3 Why the Left Succeeds 82

Chapter 4 The Left's Moral Record 168

Part II Islam and Islamism

Chapter 5 On Evaluating Religions 233

Chapter 6 The Moral Record of Islam 244

Chapter 7 Islam, America, and the West 286

Chapter 8 Responses to Arguments on Behalf of Islam 291

Part III America and Its Unique Values

Chapter 9 The American Trinity 311

Acknowledgments 390

Addendum 95

Notes 400

Index 421

Editorial Reviews

The culture wars rage on in this vigorous right-wing polemic. Conservative talk-show host Prager (Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism) fires salvos at “Islamism,” the redoubt of terrorists, anti-Semites, and theocrats, but his focus is the ideological struggle between “Americanism”—defined as low taxes, small government, religion, and militarized patriotism—and “Leftism,” the big tent of everyone from Karl Marx to the Democratic Party. Short on substantive policy analysis, he relies on broad, biting sociocultural caricatures: conservatives value liberty, reason, moral standards, hard work, earned rewards, faith, self-reliance, and manliness; leftists value authority, emotionalism, moral relativism, sexual license, unearned welfare handouts, spurious equality, nihilism, victimhood, and effeminacy. Prager scores entertaining points against left-liberals’ excesses—overblown health crusades, moral hypocrisies, profane celebrities, avant-garde art installations—while tossing off conservative briefs on everything from affirmative action to global-warming denial. Unfortunately, he often succumbs to the same kind of exaggerations and inconsistencies that he attacks. (He condemns leftists for hysterically equating the Guantánamo Bay prison to the Soviet gulag, for example, then offers the banning of incandescent lightbulbs as a latter-day example of leftists’ “Totalitarian DNA.”) There’s juicy red meat here for Prager’s fans, but other readers may find it underdone. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Heard on 120 stations nationwide, Prager plumps for American values—liberty, natural rights, and the melting-pot ideal of national unity—which he sets against four basic alternatives: Islamic totalitarianism, European-style democratic socialism, state-run capitalism (as in China), and chaos. Those who remember the controversy surrounding Prager's accusations regarding Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison will wonder about this book. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal