Buchanan explains his conservative beliefs within the framework of growing up the son of a devout Catholic scrapper and the student of tough Jesuit priests. Although he spent much of his childhood raising hell, his upbringing was about morals and care of the soul. In Buchanan's time, care of the soul meant defending American freedom from the encroachment of Leninist communism. He didn't hate the Russians, but the system of government that was devouring half the world's freedom.

To the left-leaning critic who is undoubtedly screaming, "what about America devouring the other half": you're preaching to the choir. Buchanan has consistently asserted that we shouldn't be meddling in other countries' affairs. He recalls traveling to Japan and concluding that we were wrong to indiscriminately A-bomb the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He goes on to say that our president prodded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor so that he'd have an excuse to enter the war. That's hardly the voice of an imperialistic interventionist.

Nor is Buchanan a cut-throat capitalist. At the end of the book, he talks about an America of morals being infinitely more desireable than an America of laurel-resting decadence. He observes that democracy is by itself an empty vessel that can be filled with evil intentions just as easily as it can with good intentions. The moral fiber of our people, says Buchanan, is what ultimately defines us. Compare our grandparents' generation to ours; Buchanan's point is painfully obvious. To recapture our country, Buchanan insists we recapture education, freedom of religion (rather than tacitly mandated secularism or cowtowing agnosticism), and the Supreme Court. No arguments from me.

Some people have speculated that Buchanan is a closet white supremacist, an accusation which this book shoots down. Having grown up with two black maids, having recoiled at the treatment of a southern black man who couldn't enter a whites-only restaurant to mail a letter, and having a brother who speaks of dog-tagging an equal number of dead white and black Americans in Vietman, Buchanan clearly has no time for racial discrimination. He writes about welfare depriving black Americans of their dignity, and even suggests that an ammendment prohibiting racial discrimination be added to the US Constitution.

Other than the pleasure of glimpsing into the life of a man I greatly respect, I took from this book many lessons about where our new and supposedly more advanced society fails. By deemphasizing personal responsibility and blaming our problems on society, we're creating a generation of excuse-makers and softies. By acquiescing to anybody's ideas and summarily treating all ideas as equal, we replace values with anything-goes. When people don't have something to believe in, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything. There are many more nuggets in this book.