"Dozens of feel-good stories about real-life people making a difference, and dozens of inspiring quotes from moral heavyweights like Viktor Frankl and C.S. Lewis. But David Brooks comes across as just another scam artist working a racket. The thesis of the book, that "hyper-individualism" is bad and "community" is good comes across as unbelievably shallow and hypocritical. If you've ever read War & Peace, this book is like watching Prince Vassily pretending to be Prince Andrey.

Where's Dolohov when you need him?

The author of War and Peace was a Russian aristocrat named Count Leo Tolstoy, and the book started to lose me as soon as I read David Brooks' absolutely jaw-dropping summary of Tolstoy's early life. There is no mention of Tolstoy being a count, no mention that he lived in Czarist Russia, and no mention of a thing called serfdom. Smiling David Brooks assures us that Tolstoy "sowed his wild oats" but makes no effort to understand what that really means. As a young man Tolstoy had the power of life and death over hundreds of human beings. He had extravagant wealth and privileges he did nothing to earn. He could murder, rape, and steal with the blessing of the state. And David Brooks has nothing to say about any of this! He wants you to admire the second half of Tolstoy's life, the repentance, without ever having to acknowledge the ugliness of the society that produced him. In other words, a Russian aristocrat is more honest about the failures of Czarist Russia than a modern American conservative. What does that say about Brooks?

Oh, but there's more. The next hero to get the "Brooks treatment" is rock and roll titan Bruce Springsteen. David Brooks praises the Boss extravagantly for finding his "vocation" and choosing Elvis Presley and the Beatles as role models. Brooks says that people who find their vocations transcend their selfish interests and strengthen the community. What Brooks does not say is that Bruce was rejecting an awful lot when he embraced Elvis. For young Bruce, Elvis was the ultimate hero -- the pope, the king, and the father he never had. But what does that tell us?

Bruce became a rock star because he didn't want to become a Catholic priest. Or work in a factory. Or get killed in Vietnam. Those were his only real options, yet Brooks pointedly ignores all the ways America let him down, along with millions of other working class kids. You don't have to be Dave Marsh to realize that Brooks is a fraud, an opportunist who is only using Springsteen to bolster his own defense of class distinctions and the status quo. He dismisses everything that's personal, angry, and subversive in Bruce's early work, focusing only on the Boss' later success and his hunger for mainstream respectability.

Through gross distortions, lies, and oversimplifications, Brooks advances an argument that our society is in danger because of too much individualism. Too much freedom. He suggests that society cannot survive unless people "form commitments" and "lose themselves" in a cause greater than themselves. It sounds plausible until you actually think about how corrupt society actually is.

Take for example, the well-known case of Huckleberry Finn. Brooks pretends to admire traditional American writers like John Steinbeck, and he has plenty of time for dreary old George Eliot. But he never even mentions Mark Twain's great masterpiece. Why? Huck does everything this book talks about. He moves beyond self-interest when he encounters the runaway slave Jim. Huck forms a commitment to Jim, in fact he loses himself in that commitment, effectively becoming a different person. So what's the problem? The problem is that a slave society can't tolerate unselfishness. Huck's courage, his commitment, his moral growth, doesn't strengthen the society that produced him. Huck's friendship with Jim is dangerous, unacceptable, threatening to both the church and the state. And that makes David Brooks nervous, because he loves the church and state. He's not interested in challenging authority, because he never met an authority figure he didn't like. David Brooks says society can't survive without unselfish behavior. What he doesn't say is that unjust societies also demand unselfish behavior. And that some unjust societies don't deserve to survive.

I wish I had twenty pages to describe everything that's really wrong with this book. There's the long passage about the good old days in Chicago, the old immigrant neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone, and people were happy, "even if they tolerated a lot of racism and anti-Semitism." (Come back, Studs Lonigan, America is *sorry* for what it did to you!) There's the meant-to-be-heartbreaking, but unintentionally funny deathbed scene, where preppy young David Brooks confronts his dying Jewish grandfather and has nothing to say to him. (Our suffering hero wryly puts it down to "constipation of the heart," which sounds like a potty joke from a Kevin Smith movie!)

The funniest moment is when David Brooks tries to argue with a straight face that Christianity and slavery can never coexist, because slavery "devalues the human soul." Or something. The only problem, of course, is that slavery and Christianity did coexist, for about eighteen hundred years. Which explains what a low opinion Mark Twain had of Christianity. And why David Brooks never quotes Mark Twain."

"I feel all the same feelings: the shock, the anger, the surprise, the annoyance, the weirdness, the depravity, the longing, the belonging, the want to want, the boredom, the fragility, the fear, the selfishness, the love, the intimacy and the excitement. "