Here is a truly extraordinary book, a one-man five-ring verbal circus, a phantasmagoria of wit, satire, irony, invective, diatribe, rhetoric, and pulpit oratory. The style is variously compounded of elements from Sterne, Carlyle, Swift, H. L. Mencken, and the book of Jeremiah. Yet, appearing now at a time of national introspection and moral house-cleaning, it should be a valuable book, entirely aside from its qualities as pure entertainment. Wylie claims to have been breathing the same brand of fire for the last twenty or so years, predicting the future importance of bombing and the black-hearted intentions of Hitler's gang, but limited, unfortunately, by the whims of editors to writing minor fiction and articles on fishing. This book represents, then, the eruption of a long repressed critical volcano in which every sacred American institution from Mom down to bingo comes in for a baptism of fire. What distinguishes it from the run-of-the-mill Menckenisms and Peglerisms is a set of sound philosophical premises. The style is pungent and rings all the possible changes on the modern journalistic vocabulary, but behind it all is the conviction, set forth a generation ago by Walter Lippman's "A Preface to Morals," that American is morally a very sick nation, which has lost hold on the necessarily religious basis for all good action, and forgetting the purpose of action, has begun to forget the purpose and value of life itself.

At the beginning of the last chapter, he writes, "It has been fairly fancy of me, I know, to write so long and noisy a book just to say that if we want a better world, we will have to be better people." The way to inner health, according to Wylie, is a reappraisal of what America represents to the individual. Is it merely a chance to make a million without doing very much work, or is it the condition for developing as rich and meaningful an inner life as possible? If we choose the latter alternative, we will have to be more genuinely religious and honest with our selves. He doesn't advocate a return to the Bible necessarily or any external application of dogma, but a renewal of respect for man as a receptacle of spiritual truth and a renewal of inner integrity and self-belief. The way to self-understanding in our present mess, Wylie thinks, is clear-headed criticism, a sample specimen of which he offers in this book. Sometimes his love of a fancy phrase runs away with him, especially in the amusing and one-sided chapter on Mom, but the book was intended to stimulate thought in others rather than to present a positive plan or doctrine, and it fulfills this purpose admirably.