I rely on Amazon Reader Reviews to inform me about books I am contemplating. But this time, I opened the Reviews just to revel in others’ comments about a book I felt, and feel today, is among the very best histories I have ever read, Thomas Fleming’s A Disease in the Public Mind. But I was amazed at the high percentage of one-star and two-star reviews, and so I opened those. And what I found was stunning. What I found in those one-star and two-star reviews were clouds of mad, slurring, scoffing, sarcastic impugning of Fleming and his motives and his book.

Ten years ago, I stood at a Heritage Foundation affair, congratulated the speaker, Mathew Spaulding, on the thunderous endorsement of his talk by the packed hotel ballroom, and asked him if he had ever addressed a similar ballroom packed with the Left. I added that I had been, for many years, trying to discuss, to reason, with the Left, and had finally concluded that it cannot be done. I am answered by a torrent of abuse; smug, scoffing, sneering, jeering, mocking, guffawing, hooting, japing abuse. I said that two times before on this continent, the two sides had reached a point where the discussion was impossible, and so we fought. Obviously, 1775 and 1860. I concluded, “I think we are there again. We are about at 1845. Civil war is coming.”

Time to buy old US gold coins

Mr. Fleming’s book is superb. He tracks the two-hundred-year run-up to the Civil War. Moral superiority in the North, particularly in New England, defensive truculence in the South. Each disease intensifying, mutating, growing. A Disease in the Publi... Fleming, Thomas Buy New $11.99 (as of 01:10 UTC - Details) Meticulously does Fleming trace these parallel “disease(s) in the public mind(s)”. Quoting hundreds of letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and editorials; building on the work of dozens of historians.

Perhaps some of the ancillary flyspecking offered by the Amazon critics is valid. Certainly the reference to the Constitution’s Preamble calling the Union “perpetual” is in error; but I thought the error was Lee’s, not Fleming’s, in that the sentence seemed to me to be a musing about Lee’s musing. And perhaps the lady who lives near Baltimore correctly defends the Baltimore officials from charges they deliberately failed to confront the mob that attacked the Massachusetts soldiery and killed Mr. Ladd. But nothing changes. Colonel Lee was still grievously torn between his love for The Union and his love for Virginia; and Mr. Ladd was still dead.

Every American should read A Disease in the Public Mind. For two reasons. It explains how the North and the South came to fight a devastating war which killed a million men and a president of the United States. And it opens the eyes to the disease in the public mind of the 21st century and to the Civil War that is coming.

Reprinted from Amazon.com.

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