The New York Times is the latest media medium to weigh in on professor Charles Kesler's new book, I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism (Broadside Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 2012). In this piece, The Great Disconnect, writer Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, is not as approving as other reviewers or even radio talk show hosts have been.
Writes Lilla: When Kesler begins his book by dismissing those who portray the president as "a third-world daddy's boy, Alinskyist agitator, deep-cover Muslim or undocumented alien" the reader is relieved to know that "I Am the Change" won't be another cheap, deflationary takedown. Instead, it is that rarest of things, a cheap inflationary takedown a book that so exaggerates the historical significance of this four-year senator from Illinois, who's been at his new job even less time, that he becomes both Alien and Predator.
Even from the blue side of the bullhorn, the review's prominencea four-pager on the front of the paper's Sunday Book Review section online seems to be on par with the attention that I Am the Change has been drumming up elsewhere.
The coverage for Kesler, CMC's Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government, has included guest spots the past month on Mark Levin's national radio show, Bill Bennett's Morning in America, the Michael Medved Show, and Hugh Hewitt.
His book was also the subject of recent columns in The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.