If “The Golden Thread,” the new two-volume history of the Western tradition, landed with a thud, it’s a matter of sheer weight.
Altogether about 12 pounds of book and 1,968 pages of text, “The Golden Thread” is a prodigious product — and an even more prodigious achievement.
At a time when Western civilization has been successfully “de-centered” in academia and Western civ classes relegated to the dustbin of history, the book is a counter-cultural act.
It’s devoted to the idea that learning about our own civilization should take priority over learning about others, and that we won’t realize why it’s so vital to defend our tradition without first understanding it.
“It should come as no surprise,” co-authors Allen Guelzo and James Hankins write in the introduction, “that the recent generations of Westerners who believe that the West is uniquely evil have been taught nothing at all about it.”
“The Golden Thread” is a textbook, but accessible to the general reader.
Usually, such large surveys are too general to include compelling details and too conventional to make arresting conclusions — in other words, they fall down as books.
In contrast, every page of “The Golden Thread” is highly ...