SOURCE: Jacoby, Tamar. “Unchangeable Absolutes.” New Leader 82, no. 15 (13 December 1999): 6-8.

In the following review, Jacoby asserts that, while One Nation, Two Cultures is a provocative book, Himmelfarb's arguments are ultimately not persuasive. Jacoby further faults Himmelfarb for oversimplifying the complexities of modern life in her proposed solutions to current social ills.

When acclaimed historian and social conservative Gertrude Himmelfarb surveys the moral landscape [in One Nation, Two Cultures], she comes away with exactly the kind of neat formulation a historian studying a distant period might hit upon. She sees America divided into what she calls “the dominant culture” and “the dissident culture.” Both cut across race, class and geographic lines.

The first, shaped in her view by corrosive ideas spread in the 1960s, is fatally relativistic, without respect for rules or authority, and therefore all too readily given to deviance and its consequences—everything from violent crime to...