The organization of this book is more chaos than confusion, like a town after a tornado: almost nothing is where it belongs and much is missing altogether. The wonderful Joseph Campbell appears in the chapter "Broadcasters" simply because he was once interviewed by Bill Moyers. Romano devotes eight very horny pages to Hugh Hefner but not a single paragraph to Jefferson or Paine or Thoreau — which is rather like offering a book on American music in which Billie Holiday is sacrificed to some lip-syncing, knuckleheaded minx. "The Print Journalists" omits Mencken even though he was the most important cultural commentator of the 1920s. "The Literary Critics" summarizes only the work of Edward Said, Kenneth Burke, and Harold Bloom, and balks at connecting Burke to the incipience of Bloom's thought. Romano's predictably petulant run-through of Bloom is just his recycled review of Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence, an obloquy that congratulated itself for being gabby, cheeky, and cheap, which is always how the herd of independent minds responds to anything Bloom breathes on. The several sections on John Rawls appear after the synopsis of cyberphilosophy (a compelling section that should be of interest to the bug-eyed and sun-deprived). The book at least ends where it should: with a love letter to Barack Obama, our "philosopher in chief." Lacking though he is as an author, Romano nevertheless deserves applause for his attempt to broaden the accepted parameters of philosophy and to celebrate, in his patriotic way, the American achievement in thinking. Now if we could only forget Dr. Johnson's definition of patriotism.
A "love letter" to the "philosopher in chief" may prove to be the sign of a period piece.
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