The Assault On Reason
Al Gore, The Penguin Press, 308 pages 

     Reading Al Gore's latest book, "The Assault On Reason," is a lot like scanning a textbook written by an affable and impressively informed university professor: The initial inclination is to think of it as a work-book--with an emphasis more on the work to-be-done than on the book to-be-read. But as one proceeds to negotiate the 273 pages (in 9 chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion), the read becomes somehow absorbing. It's not that "Reason" doesn't require discipline from its audience. Indeed, the shear vastness of topics that are broached seem at times to defy comprehensibility.

     We are taken from the Johannes Gutenberg's press--which, according to the former U.S. Vice President, facilitated the 15th Century Renaissance while laying the foundation for The Enlightenment--into Marshall McLuhan's ideas of "hot" and "cool" media, through the psychological notions behind attachment theory, as well as asides into the Geneva Conventions, Barry Glassner's concept of a "Culture of Fear" and the mechanics of mass persuasion. Nevertheless, in whittling the complex treatise to a pointed and singular focus, Gore throughout allows the reader to see the light at the end of this polemic tunnel.

     Known, among other things, as an author of books on ecology-- "Earth In The Balance" (1992) and "An Inconvenient Truth"(2006)--in "Reason," Gore is concerned with our political environment. As he's done in the past with the rainforest and the ozone layer, here Gore lists and laments the dangers presently threatening to destroy our democracy. Among these carcinogens to freedom are the systematic utilization of fear and misuse of religious faith; the distracting culture of entertainment; and, the power concentration extant within the national media and executive branch of the federal government.

     In the concluding portion of "Reason," Gore, referring to Fredrick Douglass, reiterates what the great abolitionist "suddenly understood: the essential connection between literacy and liberty, ignorance and 'fitness' to be a slave."

     Some pundits have made favorable comparisons to Gore's "Reason" and Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" pamphlet. But with 29 pages of chapter-by-chapter notes, and an 11 page index, Gore's accomplishment is not only replete with common sense; it is also an admirable scholarly accomplishment.

Ben Miles, National University