One of the highlights of my summer was getting the opportunity to meet Jonah Goldberg in Boston. Here’s my condensed report: Jonah Goldberg is really tall, really smart and really funny.

I must admit, I haven’t finished reading my signed copy of his new book but Sam Adkisson of The Vanderbilt Torch presents a review.

“Unity.” “Democracy.” “Diversity.” “Understanding.” All of these words are nearly universally lauded by the Western population.  It is values like these, the average citizen thinks, that have helped our nations lift themselves out of the muck of social malfeasance and political infancy the human race got stuck in for so long.

On the contrary, rigid “dogma”, conservative “social Darwinism”, and that most blighted of institutions–the Catholic Church–are responsible for all of the backwardness and oppression that we Westerners still face.

This (admittedly oversimplified) narrative is, I would venture to say, at the core of a great deal of American self-examination these days.  Certain words are utterly in vogue; certain other words are not.  But why, and how, do these words affect us more than we might realize? To answer this question–and to demolish a great deal of popular progressive sermonizing–is the goal of Jonah Goldberg’s delightfully entertaining (and possibly frightfully infuriating) The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

Read the rest at the link below.