Rating: 
Summary: Balanced, Objective, but a little naive
Review: I did enjoy this as the author does the best as possible to stay with known facts. Some research did in fact go into this book, it is not so much experience that helped Souza write this, but as the book unfolds you will notice the authors views come from being an immigrant. Comparison is not negative when applied as Souza relates homeland to the U.S.A. However the author does in fact need to take a closer look at the entire spectrum of America, a bit of dreaming shows here in the quest for that American dream. I'd recommend reading Karl Maddox's Book SB 1 or God to be a bit more real on what's so great about us.
Rating:
Summary: an understanding of patriotism
Review: this book is a thoughtful and interesting book that offers
the basis for a solid well-grounded ideas that can help the
u.s.sustain itself in the face of terrorism.
Rating:
Summary: Get past the title and find a great book
Review: I thought the title was being sarcastic and I was glad that I was wrong!I enjoyed this refreshing point of view from a grateful and intelligent immigrant. The author is a great writer and you will learn different perspectives of how America is viewed (European, Islamic, etc.). Give it a chance because I had no idea why there were such idoits that can't see how much good America does and why. The author provides a objective view of the problems perceived by non-Americans and Americans of left/right politics and gives America a good report card. The advice and information given is worthy of your time and I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: This book greatly changed my life for the better.
Review: I first came across this book while browsing the politics section at B&N. I initially laughed at it because of its simple title and the American flag it had drapped across its cover. That alone didnt cause me to laugh however. The real reason I laughed was because I was then a young college student who was being bombarded with only negative information about my country's current culture as well as it's past history by the supposed "educators" in charge of my intellectual development. This book completely shattered the worldview they had worked to create in me. Thank you Dinesh D'Souza.
Rating: 
Summary: The Right Stuff
Review: Give the man credit: he has an opinion, and he has guts. Anyone who's attended a top university in the US knows the courage it takes to challenge political orthodoxy in the rarefied palaces of academe. Yet during the campus backlash years of the Reagan administration, when students and professors busied themselves with anti-apartheid sit-ins and protests over human rights abuses in Nicaragua, Dinesh D'Souza made a splash, and more than a few enemies, when he founded the dissident conservative college paper "Dartmouth Review". The very name, with its less than subtle evocations of another well-known conservative maverick, caused a collective shudder of fear and loathing through the armies of radical activists standing guard over the fading glories of the 60s.
Since that time D'Souza has carved a niche of respect for himself in American intellectual life with his writings on American politics and sociology. His controversial recent works, "Iliberal Education" and "The End of Racism", were an out and out declaration of war on the system of leftist elites which preside over the development of thought at the nation's universities, and a systematic and devasting dissection of the cult of political correctness and its pernicious effect on the psyche of American society.
In "What's So Great About America", a lengthy post 9/11 analysis of what's gone right in the US and wrong most everywhere else in the world, D'Souza is at his most convincing and least doctinaire. He's matured as a writer, and approaches this work with the confidence of a battle scarred survivor with no axe to grind, just hard-won wisdom to share in a dangerous, unsettled world.
It's refreshing how unafraid he is to put controversial topics on the table, challenging the reader to interpret only the facts that history gives us, the truth as we know it, unalloyed by ideological contamination. He fuses heart-felt patriotism of the old fashioned kind with reasoned, thoughtful analysis. An intellectual who actually pens chapters with bold faced titles "The Reparations Fallacy: What African Americans Owe America", and "Two Cheers For Colonialism: How the West Prevailed", and then lays out his ideas with good natured, and convincing, pragmatism, offers an unequalled voice of reason in the dark forest of relativsm where American thought languishes.
Given the timing of "What's So Great..", it's important that a work like this comes to us courtesy of a recent immigrant. There's a perspective here impossible to duplicate among our nation's coddled natural born citizenry, many of whom condemn their native land as they would a resented parent who's spoiled them into impossible expectations. D'Souza brings none of this baggage to his work. He's grateful and proud to be a US citizen without feeling any need to disrespect his culture of birth. He's just seen the superiority of life here, the energy, the possibilties.
In his chapter "Becoming American", he lays out the central and simple idea that life in America is rich and bountiful not because the streets are paved with gold, but because people are allowed to create their own individuality here as they can nowhere else in the world. Accountant, Bohemian, novelist, politician, internet entrepreneur, painter...the choice here is infinite, and it is yours. The individual is the starting point of everything in American society.
This message has a ringing authenticity from someone who hails from a world where fate is prescribed, religion and God dominate, and individual initiative is spurned and in many cases squashed. There's no smugness in D'Souza's message. He articulates the hopes of immigrants to this nation for four centuries. And as uplifting as his analysis is, it's equally unsettling in its assessment of world hatred and resentment.
He draws the conclusion that history will ensure that right will prevail, and that America is nothing less than the beacon on the hill for a benighted world. His voice is consonant with the neo-conservatives and their doctrine of spreading peace and prosperity through democracy. But his tone is more modulated than theirs, reminding us of the intensity of the enemy's determination, and warning that, however worthwhile and necessary, the struggle towards a liberal world society will require all the force of unified will the nation can muster.
Rating: 
Summary: brilliant and awful!
Review: I thought this was brilliant, insightful, clearheaded it made me proud, but it was also a bit awful, embarassing, simplistic and incoherent, and damaging too.
D'Souza tells it like it is regards the legacies of slavery, and colonialism, I felt like giving a full three cheers!...all the while neglecting to talk of the exploitation, racism, structural economic inequality and suffering of the vast majority of colonial subjects.
He lambasts the politically correct, defends original visionary founding father, and rightly lampoons the crazy multiculturalists, showing how they undermine out way of life. On the other hand, his book is a recipe for intolerance in some ways, and he does'nt seem to respect other multiple cultures.
D'souza's admiration for enlightenment values is totally great and shows exactly why people want to attack us; on the other the hand the book shuns strict statistical (scientific) arguments in the main and just relies on blind assertions.
D'souza says those who feel ashamed of the US can leave; what should those of us who do feel a bit a ashamed, but also a bit elated and proud do?
Rating:
Summary: This is a serious essay. Read It!
Review: Despite the one-sidedness one comes to expect of D'Souza's books, this is a serious piece of research. D'Souza's glimpse into the worldview of the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qutb and what Qutb has to say about America alone is worth the price of the book.
Equally, his discussion of the philosophical basis of American Democracy and the balancing act required by the founding fathers to reach agreement on the Constitution are subtle and nuanced treatments of the topic unlikely to be found in everyday contemporary political writings about the U.S. -- whether within or outside the US.
Also, it is not all bad that under a thin guise of praising America, the author gives us a good bit of tongue-lashing -- a taste of what non-Americans (really) think of us. Beneath the thin veil of syrupy accolades, he issues a broadside against a long list of contemporary American social evils, a broadside that although it comes without warning, seems richly deserved and most of the times, very constructive. It helps that D'Souza's writing is lively well thought out and enthusiastic.
The good news is that his critique centers only on the past two generations of liberal tinkering, which has, as the author rightly points out, been in large part responsible for many of America's current social maladies. The bad news is that he leaves unscathed the other half of the problem, "conservative tinkering".
Also, one senses a deep inner nervousness when D'Souza discusses issues of race in America. Even though he has written a decent book on the topic, he is most superficial and least convincing when expounding on the issue of race. I find his racial analysis utterly lacking in depth or sophistication and even of only minimal honesty.
Perhaps it is unfair to say so (and I mean no disrespect) but I can only imagine this sensitivity to have more to do with being transposed from Indian Brahmin to designated or honorary American white. Undoubtedly, transposed Brahmin identity (awarded at birth like whiteness) and sympathies must lie on the side of whiteness. I have no other way of accounting for this gap in D'Souza's otherwise clean and uncompromising thinking.
In both this and his book entitled "The End of Racism," the author proves that he is a decent researcher even as he fiercely maintains his ideological blinders in the "on position." One must shudder to think how much more constructive and useful Mr. D'Souza's contribution would be were he to just once rise above being a Republican ideologue and for once taking off his conservative and Brahmin blinkers.
Despite all of this, I am hooked; I will keep reading everything he writes because, if nothing else, D'Souza is maturing. Sooner rather than later he will become the academic he is struggling to become and I hope to be around when this intellectual explosion occurs.
I give the book four stars.
Rating:
Summary: America, seen through the eyes of a conservative immigrant
Review: What is so great about America? Our land? Our wealth? Our system of government? Our people?
All of the above?
I think it is striking that all over the world, so many talented people want to join our American adventure. We're a nation dominated by immigrants, relatives of immigrants, and friends of immigrants. And I was very interested in what a talented immigrant would say about the nation he's joined. D'Souza is, of course, a politically conservative immigrant.
The book begins with a discussion of the destruction of the World Trade Center. The author points out that the terrorists were fanatics but not cowards (they did die to do all that damage). And that these fanatics do not like America, they do not like the American way of life, and they are willing to die to destroy our nation and to deprive us of our rights.
D'Souza explains that antagonism for America can be summarized as European complaints about our arrogance, Asian complaints about our lack of culture, and Muslim complaints that the whole idea of America is a subversive threat to Islam. And indeed, he says, the existence of the term "unamerican" (given that no one uses terms such as "ungerman" or "unpakistani") tends to confirm this.
There is a chapter on colonialism. The author makes four points about Western colonialism: the West did not invent colonialism, its colonialism was not the cause but the result of its wealth and power, colonialism eventually (if unintentionally) increased the wealth of the colonized lands, and colonialism (again unintentionally) introduced the language of freedom and human rights to colonized areas.
D'Souza also explains that America is unusual in that birth does not determine destiny. Anyone can pick virtually any profession to try to excel at. Couples who wish to marry can do so in spite of their status at birth. Of course, a downside for many immigrants is that their children become assimilated. Actually, I think assimilation is a plus, though (I'm a liberal, you see).
The next issue the author takes on is racism in America. There is a discussion of the history of slavery in the United States and its repudiation after the Civil War. And there is the question of affirmative action. The author believes that test score differences between, say, "Asian-Americans" and "African-Americans" are genuine, but that they have temporary and cultural causes that can be readily overcome, not genetic causes.
Now, what about American foreign policy? D'Souza does address the fact that we have often supported dictators of various sorts, including Somoza in Nicaragua and Stalin during World War Two. And we're sometimes wrong, even tactically, to do so. But he points out that we do much more good than bad overall.
Is the conflict between American society and militant Islamism a battle between two equally counterproductive ideas? Not according to the author. At the end of the book, he reminds us that our society produces folks who are "confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, and future-oriented." That compares favorably with being "wretched, servile, fatalistic, and intolerant." And the latter is what militant Islamism is producing.
This is an interesting book, and I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome read!!!
Review: I just loved this book! I am going to recommend it to some friends. D'Souza writes with such clarity, logic, insight, and his style is very engaging to boot! This book is a great antidote to the mainstream media's and liberals' pessimism and "blame America first" syndrome. I highly recommend people read this--young people included. It's so interesting!
Rating:
Summary: Natural Law versus Rousseau
Review: First, it must be stated that Dinesh D'Souza is the best conservative author on the planet in terms of persuasive discussion. I like the mud-slinging of the likes of Ann Coulter as much as the next conservative (so delicious is it!), but there are polemic mud-slingers on the other side of the argument, too, who delight all those with an appetite to tear down traditional America; such "argument" is not likely to persuade one convert: it is just preaching to the choir.
Dinesh D'Souza, however, gives the liberal arguments fair treatment, with historical explanation, and acknowledges both the virtues and vices of those positions. Then he systematically proceeds to demonstrate why the conservative viewpoint is superior. If you could actually get a liberal to read this book with an inquiring mind (no small task!), there is a good chance that his/her political viewpoint will be changed -- if not reversed.
To me, the most illuminating revelation of this book (which I believe he also alludes to in his book, "Letters to a Young Conservative") is the guiding principle behind all liberal arguments that conflicts with the guiding principle behind all conservative arguments. Until you understand these underlying philosophies, you can not really hear what the other side is saying -- even if you are listening to them. D'Souza's argument is that Conservatives base their world-view on the Judeo-Christian ethic (no surprise there), or, if you prefer, the "Natural Law" view clearly relied upon by our Founding Fathers. According to this view, there is such a thing as "truth" and "morality" and a right form of governance among men -- to which we must all aspire. The modern-day liberal view was formed in the 1960s and was taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's incitement that "truth" is relative to each person -- that we only need to be true to our inner selves. For this reason, liberals can have "rights" without responsibilities (as in, "don't try to impose your morality on me"). While conservatives generally propose that abortion, homosexuality, adultery, etc. are "wrong," liberals truly believe that those things cannot be wrong if the person is being true to his/her inner self. Likewise, while conservatives -- in line with our Founders -- view capitalistic democracy as the highest form of government, liberals truly believe that the dictatorial imposition on a country of communism, fascism, socialism, etc. is just as good as a government which has the "consent of the governed."
I highly recommend this book. I intend to purchase every D'Souza book published.
Two Cheers for Imperialism!!
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