SOURCE: “False Prescriptions,” in Spectator, May 21, 1977, p. 22.

In the following excerpt, Booker offers an unfavorable assessment of Enemies of Society.

This book [Enemies of Society] is bound to arouse considerable expectation in many people's minds. The question to which it is addressed could scarcely be more important or fascinating: why, at the end of the twentieth century, does our civilisation appear to have entered on a crisis of unprecedented magnitude?

Almost any serious attempt to discuss this question should be widely welcomed. And in recent years Paul Johnson's fiery and trenchant journalism has shown him to be the sort of author who might come up with some thoughtful and unexpected answers.

Certainly any analysis which is to make sense of our present crisis must go very wide and very deep, both into human nature and into history. And Johnson promises well by plunging us at once as far...