Fellow readers,
I would like to share my opinion about the book "Who we are. The challenges to America's National Identity" by Samuel P. Huntigton. The Wall Street Journal says "Huntington has written a compelling book on the virtues that make America what it is"on the back cover of the book . It sounds damn thoughtful, but let us take closer look.
Hispanizaton is a problem and American national identity is fading. Those are extremely important issues I wanted to hear about, instead I found the first 138 pages to be about the fundamentals of American identity. Those issues are common, we all know about protestant values, individualism, religious commitment and respect for the law. I don't mind reviewing it, but reading numerous historic facts and religious attitudes took most of my reading energy.
When I finally came to part 3 "Challenges to American identity" on page 140, I was exhausted by the history. So starving for modern tendencies I discovered one more general chapter entitled "Deconstructing America: The rise of subnational identities. It was way too general. Recognizing the fact that it's more than 100 pages left to the actual Mexican Immigration and Hispanization I stopped reading the book. It was one of the extremely rare cases in my life when I acted in a such way.
The only interesting author's point I found in "my" part of the book is about fair opportunities. Here is the quotation: "The core of the American creed, ideas of the essential dignity of the individual human being, of fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice and a fair opportunity". These rules were broken by giving preferences to minorities in admission to universities or in getting contractor jobs. By the way, a similar problem happened in Ukraine, where in the 2008 admission campaign most of the slots in good universities were suddenly occupied by handicapped and poorest, not by the smartest .
Unfortunately, it's a rather unique interesting fact I want to share with you about the book. Beside that: If you want to spend your time studying issues of modern America, take something more relative to current issues of the USA.
Disclosure: The book review is solely my impression about own reading experience.
