I picked this up for a few different reasons—I’m a fan of a magazine Dalrympe writes for on occasion, City Journal for one, and I also have a kind of silly fondness for a good, curmudgeonly, H.L. Mencken-flavored rant now and then. Also the cover is quite arresting, a statement right there: below the title and subtitle “The Mandarins and the Masses” is an extreme version of your standard silly punk-barbarian, died mohawk and braids, facial piercings, cat-eye contact lenses. The contrast of that cover photo and the title perfectly encapsulates the contents.

The contents, though, are a bit of a surprise. While there’s plenty of the strangely amusing cultural decline rants I’ve come to love (I’m thinking specifically of books like Paul Fusell’s _BAD: Or the Dumbing of America” here), there’s a truly despairing note I don’t often encounter that is way more touching than usual. Dalrymple, you see, has traveled the world as a physician, ministering to the victims of genocide and neglect, has seen first-hand what the breakdown of the nuclear family really means (he comes down particularly hard on the welfare-dependent single moms who choose their jackass boyfriends over their own children’s welfare as a matter of course—as who wouldn’t? It really is shocking, way more shocking than the appearance of the dude on the cover photo).

Don’t go looking for solutions here, of course: the curmudgeon rant genre rarely has any. BUT, why demand that of them? Demanding that the person who points out the problem also come up with a solution for it is a very quick and easy way to shut down dissent and stifle discourse, and allowing that to happen is part of how we got where we are.

So ultimately, this book made me sad. But I’d still recommend it to anyone.