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The 34 authors of these 36 essays contend that an increasingly unhealthy culture threatens to undermine the US's long-standing democratic traditions. Among the authors' shared assumptions are that democratic institutions are inherently fragile; that democratic governance depends on virtuous citizens capable of exercising self-restraint for the common good; that one's basic character is a cultural product; that a toxic cultural environment contributes to the breakdown of American society; and that both popular culture and defective cultural elites are responsible for this breakdown. A final shared position--that culture can be altered for the better (and that the US's democratic experiment can be vindicated) if intellectuals and activists adopt long-term strategies of cultural renewal--offers a glimmer of hope in an otherwise gloomy argument. Essays on topics ranging from fatherhood to fashion, from John Witherspoon to Christopher Lasch, and from cultural homogenization to the cultural underpinnings of American democracy, are passionately argued and generally well written. Together they provide a good introduction to a neo-Tocquevillian cultural politics as advocated by the National Fatherhood Initiative and the Hudson Institute, among other groups. Recommended for all academic libraries. L. Maley III University of Massachusetts at Amherst