SOURCE: Shapiro, Edward S. “A Modern Jeremiad.” World & I 15, no. 5 (May 2000): 275-79.

In the following review of One Nation, Two Cultures, Shapiro asserts that Himmelfarb's depiction of the United States as deeply divided into two cultures is an exaggeration.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, the wife of Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neoconservatism, is one of America's most distinguished and prolific intellectual historians. Her area of specialization is nineteenth-century England, and her books include Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (1952), Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959), Victorian Minds (1968), On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (1974), and The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984). One Nation, Two Cultures is the latest in a series of volumes by her on the impact of moral thinking on society. These began with Marriage and Morals among the Victorians (1986) and include Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of...