WHEN A NATION LOSES ITS MORAL AND POLITICAL MIND

Frederick Brown, The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940 (New York: Knopf, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "The Embrace of Unreason picks up where Brown's previous book, For the Soul of France, left off to tell the story of France in the decades leading up to World War II." "We see trough the lives of three writers (Maurice Barres, Charles Maurras and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle) how the French intelligentsia turned away from the humanistic traditions and rationalistic ideals born out of the Enlightenment in favor of submission to authority that stressed patriotism, militarism, and xenophobia; how French extremists, traumatized by the horrors of the battlefront and exalted by the glories of wartime martyrdom, tried to redeem France's collective identity, as Hitler's shadow lengthened over Europe." Might America be tending toward its own "embrace of unreason" in the decade and a half since 9/11? Think Tea Party. Think anti-immigration sentiments. Think Patriot Act. Think Ferguson, Missouri, and race relations. Think Citizens United.).