Book Review

Mark Steyn America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
Regnery Publishers, 2006

Jacob Angelo
Western Civilization, 9:00 A.M.

America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It, by Mark Steyn is yet another novel composed by the author which he vents his views on problems in our world today. Mark was born on the eighth of December, nineteen fifty-nine in Toronto, Ontario Canada. While he was attending King Edward’s School in Birmingham United Kingdom, the sixteen year old dropped out to purse a career as a disc jockey. In nineteen eighty-six, he landed a job as a musical theatre critic at The Independent. Eventually his interests shifted to politics and began writing a column in The Daily Telegraph. From there he went on to write for multiple publications such as: National Review, National Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and New Criterion, just to name a few. With his acquired reputation, he appeared on many media programs like The Rush Limbaugh Program, became a professor at Hillsdale College, and wrote the novels: The Story of Miss Saigon 1991, The Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musical Then and Now 1999, The Face of the Tiger 2002, and America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It 2006. Steyn uses his most current book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, as a vessel delivering the evidence backing the theories: inevitable self-destruction in Western Civilization, Islam is a dangerous sleeping giant, and that America is the only hope for the West.
America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It, by Mark Steyn is the author’s interpretation of global demographic trends of Muslims, the countries they occupy, and the affects they have. Key points discussed in the book are Western Civilization’s flaws with in their economical and political infrastructure, the reasons for Islam is a threat, and the ways America stands out from the rest of Western Society. As said by Mark Steyn himself, “The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States…” For a population to remain stable, an average 2.1 births per woman is required. America’s average birth rate is around 2.1, yet countries like Canada (1.48), Europe as a whole (1.38), Japan (1.32), and Russia (1.14) have shrinking populations. The author relies on hard facts, demographic trends, and historical relevance to support his argument. What could be so bad about decreasing our populations? Will this not slow us from sucking up all the world’s recourses, and lower the global need for food? What is wrong with immigration? Unfortunately the speculators have it all wrong because they don’t account for human intervention. We are capable of drilling oil supplies for the rest of our lives, and increasing growing efficiency in farming, yet with populations shrinking, we will run out of people to fix the problems before we ever reach their critical breaking point. Often over looked because of these other concerns’, is the western civilization’s dependency on a growing population to function properly as it has in the past. Immigrants that are coming into our countries to do the jobs of our unborn offspring, threaten the very life styles we wish to maintain. Steyn emphasizes that we should acknowledge the changes in demographics already noticeable in Western Civilization. Economies have begun to collapse because they are deprived of the young people need to fund secondary impulses such as child and health care. Instead of focusing on military, families, and reproduction endeavors, we pinch pennies by cutting them out. Immigrants move in from developing countries to fill population gaps, and bring with them their religions and political views. Aside from America, which recognizes these problems, the people of Islam have started their invasion on these countries.
Besides being a religion, Islam is a political guideline. Familiar through the