All reviews of Grant’s writing use the adjective noble. It is apt. But the word for his new essays is audacious. They undertake a critique of America’s 400-year march to world empire measured by the things America has lost along the way. The reviewer can neither affirm nor deny Grant’s dark perceptions, only marvel at their power.

An outstanding attempt to deal with the problem of North American values … Grant’s great and brooding presence dominates the book, a massive seer pointing out the aridity of the mainstream of Western intellectual life since Bacon.

To understand this agonized and grandly argued book is difficult; to do so is deeply disturbing, for its pessimism is reasoned and all but complete. But not to try to understand it is to shy away from an attempt to understand our times.

No Canadian has written with such a sweeping insight on this subject before. Grant’s is a moving plea, evocative, passionate, and deeply human. It sounds those hidden chords in all of us that could atheists religious and socialists conservative, and have them discover that against the common condition, their own divisions are insignificant.