January 25, 2013 By Bruce Bawer Comments (4)
“I have been half in love with easeful Death…”– John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
Easeful death: that, in a nutshell, is the topic of Samuel Gregg’s new book, Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future. Gregg, who is the director of research at the Acton Institute, reminds us that when Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America in 1831, he encountered a nation of people who startled and impressed him with their robustness, energy, ambition, and entrepreneurial spirit – in a word, their life. The America of today, or at least the America of not very long ago, was still recognizably, at heart, the same America that Tocqueville wrote about in Democracy in America: a country of hard-working, optimistic people who believed ardently in self-reliance, individual enterprise, and – above all – freedom….To Read More….
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