The Assault on Reason by Al GoreReview by: Walter Russell MeadForeign Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2007), pp. 171-172Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20032463 .

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by the historical profession. Whatever one thinks of his policies, Reagan emerges here as a focused, take-charge president in full control of his cabinet and adminis tration. He was extremely selective in regard to which issues he took up and

willing to let many lower-priority matters slide, but on the things that he cared about, he was forceful and persistent. These are diary entries and lack the intellectual heft and stylistic polish of some of the earlier Reagan writings to reach the public. But they show a president stamping his per sonality and his views on an administra tion and contribute to a richer vision of the most influential U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt. One can only wish that Roosevelt had also kept a diary.

Dr. Livingstone, IPresume?Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, andEmpire. BY CLARE PETTITT. Harvard University Press, 2007, 264 pp. $22.95.

This entertaining and instructive book

sets the Tanzanian encounter between the Scottish explorer David Livingstone and the American journalist Henry Mor ton Stanley in the broad context of British imperialism, Anglo-American rivalry and reconciliation, and the rise of a transatlantic cult of celebrity. The celebrated encounter took place in Ujiji, then a thriving, mostly

Muslim settlement on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Livingstone, who had trained for a missionary career but focused increas ingly on geographic exploration, had fallen ill in the course of a long search for the source of the Nile. Stanley, a correspondent for the brash New York Herald, tracked Livingstone down but failed to persuade him to return with him to Europe. Living stone went on questing, and died soon after the meeting. The outlines of the

story can be quickly told; Pettitt is, rightly, more interested in the media responses to the event than the event itself. Ameri cans saw the meeting as both a triumph of American ingenuity (forestalling feeble British efforts to succor the famous mis sionary) and a sign of improving relations after the strains of the Civil War. British interpretations were darker. In any event, the story was a media sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and contributed to the rapprochement between the two great

Anglophone powers.

TheAssault on Reason. BY AL GORE. Penguin Press, 2007, 320 pp. $25.95.

Of all the vice presidents who have not later made it to the Oval Office on their own, Gore is beyond any doubt the most successful. It is not just that his 2000 bid for the presidency gained a solid plurality of the national popular vote and that the result in Florida was so narrow and con troversial. Gore stands alone as the only former U.S. president or vice president ever to win an Oscar, and no former vice president can match Gore's literary output in either quantity or impact. TheAssault on Reason is vintage Gore: tightly reasoned but passionate, partisan but not demagogic, sweeping and ambitious but closely re searched and solidly grounded in particu lar issues and facts. Above all, it is earnest.

Gore believes that the modern conservative movement represents a systematic attack on the role of reasoned debate in policy and public life by an alliance of economic special interests, religious fundamentalists, and other enemies of justice and truth. TheAssault on Reason will strike many readers as a well-timed, well-aimed jeremiad. Others, looking back on U.S. political history, will wonder whether the

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deceit, chicanery, and polarization of politics today is really as unprecedented as Gore would have us believe.

Redemption: The Last Battle ofthe Civil War. BY NICHOLAS LEMANN. Farrar, Straus

& Giroux, 2006, 272 pp. $24.00.

Lemann offers a brisk but thoughtful account of one of the tragic failures in U.S. history: the failure of Reconstruction to consolidate a nonracial democracy in the South. The story focuses on Adelbert

Ames, son-in-law of the much-hated Massachusetts radical Benjamin Butler. Caught between his father-in-law's polit ical ambitions, mounting white resistance to democratic rule, Northern public opin ion that was weary of war, and a president,

Ulysses S. Grant, who had reluctantly concluded that Reconstruction could not be contained, Ames did his best to do his duty at an unpropitious time, but he was the last Republican governor in

Mississippi for a century: violence and fraud restored the state to white South ern rule as Reconstruction collapsed across the South. Northern voters, unspeakably

weary after years of turmoil, were no longer prepared to support the rule of law in the Southern states. This dismal story is a particularly timely read, as U.S. politi cians and military leaders wrestle with the problems of Iraq. Republicans, it seems, are still very good at winning wars, but nation building is more problematic.

A History ofthe English-Speaking Peoples Sincelgoo. BY ANDREW ROBERTS.

HarperCollins, 2007, 752 pp. $35.00. This misnamed book is likely to be remembered chiefly as the last time a serious author attempted to write an

Anglocentric history of the twentieth

century. Minor episodes in British history enthrall him; major developments else

where are passed over in silence. Less a systematic history than a collection of sketches and episodes, the book will introduce a new generation of American readers to a British imperial sensibility that most thought had vanished long ago. For Roberts, Irish independence is a tragedy, India a ghastly mistake. The "Special Relationship" (Roberts always refers to it in capital letters) is seen as a central feature not only of British but also of U.S. foreign policy. George W. Bush is a hero; the invasion of Iraq was just what Winston Churchill would have done. Although this is a sometimes slapdash, sometimes infuriating book,

Roberts' learning and wit keep the reader turning the pages. One sputters in indig nation, one snorts in disbelief, one rolls one's eyes at the logrolling and the score settling, but one is never bored.

Western Europe PHILIP H. GORDON

Secularism Confronts Islam. BY OLIVIER ROY. Columbia University Press, 2007, 144 PP. $24.50.

Secularism Confronts Islam is the latest brilliant little book by the French scholar Roy, one of the world's leading academic experts on Islam, especially Islam in Europe. Roy tackles an important and controversial question: Is Islam compatible

with Europe's increasingly secular society? Many scholars, politicians, and polemicists

say no, arguing that Islam makes no distinction between religion and politics and that it is not just a religion but also a

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