In some ways it is a mixed blessing for a book to be timelyâ??and not just in the sense that the phrase â??may you live in interesting timesâ? is not exactly a benediction. Timely books are the envy of every author because they are actually read and discussedâ??or discussed, anyway. But they are also more easily refuted and harder to judge on their own merits. They are too often praised, vilified, or misread for transient reasons.
So it is simultaneously a compliment, a criticism, and a caution to observe that, in A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, Andrew Hartman has written a very timely book indeed. To a number of recent observers, the current cultural and political climate bears a close resemblance to the 1990s, another period in which left-right cultural clashes and â??identity politicsâ? both figured prominently. In recent months, campuses across the country have exploded with such conflicts, with Yale and the University of Missouri prominent among them. Then as now, questions about race, gender, and sexual orientation were at the forefront. Of course the issues have changed to some extent; there are bound to be differences between on- and off-campus controversies separated by twenty years. And the rise of social media has rendered public debate over these and other issues more democratic, more passionate, and more transient. Still, the tenor of both periods is remarkably similar. In this sense, any book, like Hartmanâ??s, that carefully revisits the culture-war heyday of the 1980s and â??90s just as we enter another such moment is timely and worthwhile.
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