Mr. Reynolds’ enthusiasms have proven popular enough to make Instapundit the seventh-most-linked-to blog on the Internet, according to data compiled by the blog-tracking Web site Technorati and published in a recent issue of New York magazine. Among political blogs, only two sites are bigger than his, and both are group efforts: The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington’s Hollywood gabfest, and DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga’s left-wing community. Before Instapundit, Mr. Reynolds anonymously fed his amateur-pundit urges by opining, under multiple aliases, in “The Fray,” Slate’s reader forum. Among some journalists (I’m not one), that kind of behavior gets you labeled a crank. But outsource the same thoughts to your vanity Web site and you’re fit to be a guest on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz.

Blogging made Mr. Reynolds famous, at least in the medium-size universe of people—journalists, law professors, and the handful of political and news junkies who aren’t journalists or law professors—who read news-and-politics blogs. It landed him two regular gigs in the mainstream media: a blog at MSNBC.com and a blog at The Guardian’s new group blog, “Comment Is Free …. ” (Yes, he has three blogs.) If Mr. Reynolds deigns to bless a puny, readerless blog with a link from Instapundit, he creates the fabled “Instalanche,” a wave of readers whose traffic can vault a blog from obscurity to the A-list (or at least the B-list.)

So you would think that Mr. Reynolds would devote his new techno-topian manifesto, An Army of Davids, to the wonders of blogging. But he doesn’t. On that subject, Mr. Reynolds is remarkably sedate. The triumphalist tone he strikes on Instapundit turns out to be a bit of a pose. Blogging, Mr. Reynolds tells us, is like brewing your own beer: You do it because it’s fun and because it makes you happy, not because you think you’re going to take down Anheuser Busch.

Mr. Reynolds has bigger things on his mind than blogging, such as explaining how, in the future, everyone is going to live forever on a terraformed Mars, where we’ll all work from Starbucks. (It’s slightly more convincing than it sounds.) The various chapters—including ones on blogging, nanotechnology, aging research and space travel—are supposedly linked by a unifying theme: All of these technologies help the little guy. See, nanotechnology, it’s really small, so it fits. And slowing the aging process, that helps people. And space travel, that involves technology. To the limited extent that this scattershot approach succeeds, it’s because the book resembles Mr. Reynolds’ blog: cheery, brief, optimistic, opinionated, idiosyncratic. Unfortunately, it more often resembles Mr. Reynolds’ blog: condescending, slight, triumphalist, data-free, idiosyncratic. The entire book is written in an oblivious, lecturing-to-children tone (“People used to be ignorant. It was hard to learn things.”)

There’s something to the notion that technology—whether slingshots or Web sites—lets the individual level the battlefield against institutional Goliaths. But Mr. Reynolds doesn’t add any new or surprising thoughts. He thinks it’s novel to point out that we’re moving from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy, that the Internet is cutting out the middleman and “disintermediating” many industries, and that technology now gives individuals powers that once belonged only to nation-states.

Mr. Reynolds is also very good at vanquishing straw men. No idea passes through his mind, it seems, without simultaneously conjuring up an army of imaginary skeptics wielding preposterous, easily debunked arguments. In one passage, he imagines how “bluenoses” would scorn his practice of taking his daughter to the Build-a-Bear store at the mall. In another, he fantasizes that members of the media get upset when citizens respond to disasters calmly, and without the need for directions from government officials, “because there’s no one in charge to interview.”

Most of all, Mr. Reynolds also seems wholly unaware of the many ways in which his thesis is invalid. It may be fun to pretend that you’re a rugged online individual fighting The Man of big institutions that keep putting you down. But Instapundit himself draws a paycheck from an institution of a kind that’s been around since the Middle Ages: the university (and his is funded by the state). There are exceptions, but the vast bulk of successful news-and-politics bloggers seem to be tenured professors or prominent journalists. Who are the Davids here?

The original David, the boy-with-slingshot who felled the fearsome Philistine giant, didn’t stay small for long: After the slingshot episode, he rose to become king of the Israelites. And he abused his power, sending a man to his death so that he, David, might sleep with the dead man’s wife. In other words, David eventually became a Goliath. And so has Instapundit, at least in his corner of blogdom—though to my knowledge he has yet to kill anyone.

In the blogosphere, there’s an irritating convention: the use of the phrase “gets it” to mean “agrees with me.” To be honest, I think Glenn Reynolds gets it. I just wish he did more than that. If you don’t believe me, well, read the whole thing.

Chris Suellentrop writes the “Opinionator” column for The New York Times.

Mr. Reynolds’ enthusiasms have proven popular enough to make Instapundit the seventh-most-linked-to blog on the Internet, according to data compiled by the blog-tracking Web site Technorati and published in a recent issue of New York magazine. Among political blogs, only two sites are bigger than his, and both are group efforts: The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington’s Hollywood gabfest, and DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga’s left-wing community. Before Instapundit, Mr. Reynolds anonymously fed his amateur-pundit urges by opining, under multiple aliases, in “The Fray,” Slate’s reader forum. Among some journalists (I’m not one), that kind of behavior gets you labeled a crank. But outsource the same thoughts to your vanity Web site and you’re fit to be a guest on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz.

Blogging made Mr. Reynolds famous, at least in the medium-size universe of people—journalists, law professors, and the handful of political and news junkies who aren’t journalists or law professors—who read news-and-politics blogs. It landed him two regular gigs in the mainstream media: a blog at MSNBC.com and a blog at The Guardian’s new group blog, “Comment Is Free …. ” (Yes, he has three blogs.) If Mr. Reynolds deigns to bless a puny, readerless blog with a link from Instapundit, he creates the fabled “Instalanche,” a wave of readers whose traffic can vault a blog from obscurity to the A-list (or at least the B-list.)

So you would think that Mr. Reynolds would devote his new techno-topian manifesto, An Army of Davids, to the wonders of blogging. But he doesn’t. On that subject, Mr. Reynolds is remarkably sedate. The triumphalist tone he strikes on Instapundit turns out to be a bit of a pose. Blogging, Mr. Reynolds tells us, is like brewing your own beer: You do it because it’s fun and because it makes you happy, not because you think you’re going to take down Anheuser Busch.

Mr. Reynolds has bigger things on his mind than blogging, such as explaining how, in the future, everyone is going to live forever on a terraformed Mars, where we’ll all work from Starbucks. (It’s slightly more convincing than it sounds.) The various chapters—including ones on blogging, nanotechnology, aging research and space travel—are supposedly linked by a unifying theme: All of these technologies help the little guy. See, nanotechnology, it’s really small, so it fits. And slowing the aging process, that helps people. And space travel, that involves technology. To the limited extent that this scattershot approach succeeds, it’s because the book resembles Mr. Reynolds’ blog: cheery, brief, optimistic, opinionated, idiosyncratic. Unfortunately, it more often resembles Mr. Reynolds’ blog: condescending, slight, triumphalist, data-free, idiosyncratic. The entire book is written in an oblivious, lecturing-to-children tone (“People used to be ignorant. It was hard to learn things.”)

There’s something to the notion that technology—whether slingshots or Web sites—lets the individual level the battlefield against institutional Goliaths. But Mr. Reynolds doesn’t add any new or surprising thoughts. He thinks it’s novel to point out that we’re moving from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy, that the Internet is cutting out the middleman and “disintermediating” many industries, and that technology now gives individuals powers that once belonged only to nation-states.

Mr. Reynolds is also very good at vanquishing straw men. No idea passes through his mind, it seems, without simultaneously conjuring up an army of imaginary skeptics wielding preposterous, easily debunked arguments. In one passage, he imagines how “bluenoses” would scorn his practice of taking his daughter to the Build-a-Bear store at the mall. In another, he fantasizes that members of the media get upset when citizens respond to disasters calmly, and without the need for directions from government officials, “because there’s no one in charge to interview.”

Most of all, Mr. Reynolds also seems wholly unaware of the many ways in which his thesis is invalid. It may be fun to pretend that you’re a rugged online individual fighting The Man of big institutions that keep putting you down. But Instapundit himself draws a paycheck from an institution of a kind that’s been around since the Middle Ages: the university (and his is funded by the state). There are exceptions, but the vast bulk of successful news-and-politics bloggers seem to be tenured professors or prominent journalists. Who are the Davids here?

The original David, the boy-with-slingshot who felled the fearsome Philistine giant, didn’t stay small for long: After the slingshot episode, he rose to become king of the Israelites. And he abused his power, sending a man to his death so that he, David, might sleep with the dead man’s wife. In other words, David eventually became a Goliath. And so has Instapundit, at least in his corner of blogdom—though to my knowledge he has yet to kill anyone.

In the blogosphere, there’s an irritating convention: the use of the phrase “gets it” to mean “agrees with me.” To be honest, I think Glenn Reynolds gets it. I just wish he did more than that. If you don’t believe me, well, read the whole thing.

Chris Suellentrop writes the “Opinionator” column for The New York Times.

And not just dollars: “Germans googelte, Finns googlata, and the Japanese guguru,” write David A. Vise and Mark Malseed in The Google Story. Despite the international translations, Mr. Vise, a reporter for The Washington Post, and Mr. Malseed, a researcher for Bob Woodward’s Bush at War and Plan of Attack, don’t subscribe to the linguistic theory of business success. Their ambition is much grander: “Not since Gutenberg invented the modern printing press more than 500 years ago,” the authors declare in their very first sentence, “has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google.”

It is meet and right to thank Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page that we’re not all AltaVista-ing our way around the Internet, and not just because Googling saves us a few syllables. But Messrs. Vise and Malseed appear to have confused the library with the Dewey Decimal System, or perhaps the card catalog. Gutenberg’s invention would be far less useful if every time you went to check out a book, you had to sift through hundreds of irrelevant works to find the one you were looking for. So Dewey—like Google—deserves praise. But let’s not overstate the importance of the taxonomer.

Still, without the extraordinary—“magical”—ability of Google to index the Web and usefully sort it in response to users’ search queries, the Internet would be a far more forbidding place for newbies and Net veterans alike. According to Messrs. Vise and Malseed, many people “have come to regard Google and the Internet as one.” Their Gutenberg analogy indicates that the authors themselves are similarly confused.

But if it’s not the new Gutenberg, what is Google exactly? It’s part software company, part hardware company, part media company, part ad agency. The hardware may be the most surprising part. “Google’s best-kept secret,” Messrs. Vise and Malseed write, is the importance of a huge network of “garden-variety PCs on steroids” that are assembled by company employees and used to hold copies of everything on the Internet. Google’s genius lies not just in its clever software to organize the Web, but also in its cheap, company-built hardware. In that sense, “We’re like Dell,” says Peter Norvig, Google’s director of search quality.

Messrs. Vise and Malseed list Google among the 20th century’s signature inventions—the light bulb, the telephone, the assembly line, the computer—but their best analogy may be the national television networks: Like ABC, CBS and NBC (O.K., and Fox), Google provides “ads and programming to network affiliates.” Small Web sites and blogs rely on Google to provide targeted advertisements to their users and readers, and they split the revenue with Google. The company also provides the exact same service to Internet giants like Amazon.com, America Online, and The New York Times’ Web site. Even another search engine, Ask Jeeves, relies on Google to sell ads and then target them to its users. “We saw Google as an ad agency,” says Steve Berkowitz, the C.E.O. of Ask Jeeves.

There’s an interesting tale here, which is why it’s disappointing that Messrs. Vise and Malseed tell it so clunkily. Here’s the moment when Google co-founder Larry Page learned about the death of his father: “For Larry, the sudden loss was traumatic. ‘I remember Larry sitting on the steps of the Gates Building, and he was very depressed,’” a Stanford classmate says. Here’s another classmate describing Mr. Page and Sergey Brin in their grad-student days: “They were fun guys to share an office with …. We were all very engaged in what we were doing and all pretty happy.”

Happy is the note Messrs. Vise and Malseed strike throughout their book. The thesis, if there is one, seems to be that Google is a great company started by fun guys. As a result, bad news gets short shrift. The company’s refusal to speak to the tech-news site CNET for a year—after CNET demonstrated how easy it is to use Google to uncover information about private individuals—is barely mentioned. The authors mention offhandedly that Google fired an employee for inappropriate blogging, but they say nothing more about the incident. The chapter about Google Print, the company’s effort to digitize the holdings of some of the largest university libraries, is already outdated: It doesn’t mention the new lawsuit filed to block the venture.

Despite the newspaperish prose and Panglossian tone, The Google Story manages to stay fairly interesting by turning up intriguing factoids. For example, people who type “digital cameras” rather than “digital camera” into Google are more likely to purchase one, which is why the plural keyword costs advertisers about 30 cents more per click than the singular. And you may never have searched for “mesothelioma,” but trial lawyers have bid that keyword—“a type of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos”—up to more than $30, making it one of Google’s most expensive. As a young child, Larry Page built “a working inkjet printer out of Legos.” At Stanford, Sergey Brin “developed a love for the trapeze.” Best of all, Google’s bathrooms “have extravagant, touchpad-controlled toilets with six levels of heat for the seat and automated washing, drying, and flushing without the need for toilet paper.” (Doesn’t that sound at least as world-changing as a search engine?)

Again and again, however, Messrs. Vise and Malseed expand on the tedious (“In Greek mythology, Midas was the king whose magic touch turned everything to gold”) and skip over the fascinating (what was that about the trapeze?). The Google Story has a pre-Google feel to it. The original, outmoded search engines were effective at digging up what was on the Internet, but they couldn’t organize the information and present it in a useful way. You could say that in this book, Google has been AltaVista’d.

Chris Suellentrop writes for Radar, Slate and Wired.

With fewer than 90 days until the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the blob of TV cameras and political reporters that quadrennially descends on the two first-in-the-nation states has begun growing faster than the nation's G.D.P. When I traveled to Iowa last week for a look at Dick Gephardt's Presidential campaign, I was shocked to find that 19 other journalists from national media outlets had decided to join us. Just a couple of days earlier, only three national reporters had been trailing the man from Missouri.

Already, in late 2003, the "bubble" that has begun to surround the Democratic candidates means that the campaigns become more stage-managed and the candidates more remote; interviews get parceled out to reporters in 10-minute segments. That's why USA Today political columnist Walter Shapiro decided to begin his coverage of the 2004 Presidential campaign earlier than ever, in 2002 and early 2003, when the candidates launched their bids for the White House. Before the frenzy of the Boys on the Bus, Mr. Shapiro elected to be the solitary Man in the Van, riding along through Iowa and New Hampshire to enjoy the "enforced intimacy" that a long car ride permits between two men-even two men as wary as a Presidential candidate and a journalist. The result is One-Car Caravan, a slender, breezy, entertaining account of Mr. Shapiro's travels with the Men Who Would Beat Bush (and they are all men-Carol Moseley Braun has been left out of the picture) and his impression of them.

The idea behind the early-bird strategy is that "the best way to gauge their personalities, their intellects, their motivations and their aspirations is to be there at the beginning when everything seems possible, even the Presidency itself." But there are also drawbacks to arriving on the scene during the "opening-gun" phase of the contest. Wesley Clark's candidacy is almost entirely absent from the book, and what little time Mr. Shapiro spends with Bob Graham seems a little pointless (if still amusing) now that Mr. Graham has dropped out of the race. And save for a quick chapter on Al Sharpton, Mr. Shapiro chooses to spend no time considering the role played by Dennis Kucinich and other minor players.

There aren't a lot of surprises in Mr. Shapiro's portraits of the candidates. Howard Dean comes across as both a shrewd politician and a frugal one-he stays overnight in supporters' homes rather than hotels, he frets over the cost of a campaign pamphlet, and he flies Southwest Airlines. Mr. Shapiro does worry, however, that Dr. Dean, to put it charitably, prefers "powerful narrative over literal truth." Dr. Dean tells a "partially deceptive" tale (which he still uses on the stump) to explain his opposition to parental notification for abortion: When he was a doctor, he treated a 12-year-old girl who he believed had been impregnated by her father. But Dr. Dean omits a critical element of the story: Though the girl was sexually abused, Dr. Dean ultimately discovered that she wasn't abused by her father. In a more worrisome moment, Dr. Dean tells a story to Mr. Shapiro in September 2002 that he flatly denies 11 months later to Larry King. Mr. Shapiro likes and admires the former Vermont governor, but the episode leaves him queasy about "the candidate I probably agree with the most on the issues." (Also, a note to Dr. Dean: tell your fund-raising director to take down the 1984 "Mondale for President" poster in her office.)

As for the other candidates, Dick Gephardt lacks the charisma of a Dean or a John Edwards, but he compensates for being boring ("Bob Dole without the humor, Lyndon Johnson without the earthiness") with the "Old Economy virtues" of "solidity," "good spirits" and "loyalty." Joe Lieberman's appeal is his "balanced temperament," but he's also "strangely impenetrable," a man who "brandishes his surface affability as a weapon to keep other people, especially reporters, at a distance." Mr. Edwards ("his whole being a study in inchoate charisma") represents the "beguiling Democratic myth" of a Southern white knight, but he's agonizingly indecisive-when he's fretting over whether he's up to the job of the Presidency or when he's hiring campaign staff.

John Kerry is the candidate whose up-close persona contradicts his media caricature, Mr. Shapiro writes. Rather than a "haughty, overly ambitious patrician who is a bit too slick in his eagerness to exploit his heroism in Vietnam," the Massachusetts Senator turns out to be the candidate Mr. Shapiro personally likes best-the one "with whom I would most enjoy going out for a beer." Although it's true that Mr. Kerry can be "tense, defensive, and curiously tone-deaf," he's also "a hands-on candidate, a toucher." Most important, the wistful and cerebral Mr. Kerry seems "just depressed enough to be interesting."

His position on the Iraq war turns out to be not quite as tortured and shifting as it's frequently made out to be, though it is difficult to sum up in a sound bite. Mr. Kerry himself may have put it best when he tried to explain his vote for the Congressional war resolution in October 2002: "My vote was cast in a way that made it very clear, Mr. President, I'm voting for you to do what you said you're going to do, which is to go through the U.N. and do this through an international process. If you go unilaterally, without having exhausted these remedies, I'm not supporting you. And if you decide that this is just a matter of straight pre-emptive doctrine for regime-change purposes without regard to the imminence of the threat, I'm not going to support you." By the same token, Mr. Dean's position on the war is more subtle than you might think-witness his statement from February 2003: "Remember, I did not say that I would not use unilateral force against Saddam. What I said was, 'He is not an imminent threat to the United States.'"

The best parts of One-Car Caravan come during Mr. Shapiro's brief ruminations on the election process and the press. He wonders why political reporters, in a tell-all culture, don't explore the effect that a parent's death has on a candidate; he supposes that most political reporters are too young to understand "how the mid-life loss of a parent can tilt one's inner world off its axis." (Both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Gephardt lost their mothers in late 2002, and Mr. Dean decided not to seek re-election as Vermont governor in August 2001, the same month his father died.)

In a modern Presidential race, Mr. Shapiro points out, candidates are "self-nominated" rather than chosen by party insiders and bosses. His exploration of the fund-raising "money primary" turns up the insight that campaign-finance reform, by doubling the individual campaign-contribution limit to $2,000, probably made the Democratic field larger than it would have been otherwise. Without the increase, Messrs. Gephardt, Lieberman and Edwards would all likely have been forced to drop out for lack of funds. (During the first quarter of 2003, Messrs. Gephardt and Lieberman "received more than 85 percent of their funding in increments of $1,000 or more.") Mr. Shapiro's examination of the hiring of campaign staff, and how the process is a window into how the candidates would operate their administrations, is an astute treatment of an underexamined subject.

Mr. Shapiro says he was inspired as a teenager to become a political reporter by reading Theodore White's The Making of the President: 1960. Teddy White this isn't, but One-Car Caravan is artfully written and at times laugh-out-loud funny ("Edwards' use of the phrase 'regular people' was so incessant that it inspired mocking comparisons to a TV pitchman hawking a new over-the-counter remedy for constipation"). And it was an ingenious idea to put out the first "instant book" about the 2004 campaign in 2003.

The ending is unsatisfying, simply because the story hasn't ended. But the book can give you an odd feeling, especially if you're a political junkie who's excited about the 2004 whirlwind-a kind of false nostalgia, a wish that the campaign in progress hadn't started yet, that it was all just beginning and you could be there, along for the ride, in a one-car caravan.

Chris Suellentrop, Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief, has been covering the Democratic candidates since July 2003.

What's wrong with Venus? That's the question Will Hutton proposes in response to Robert Kagan's now-famous formulation that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." In fact, Mr. Hutton argues, Americans ought to consider a change of scene.

It's an unspoken retort, given that Mr. Hutton's book, A Declaration of Interdependence , was published last year in Britain (as The World We're In ), well before Mr. Kagan invoked Venus and Mars in Of Paradise and Power . And Mr. Hutton's book can't be seen as a rebuttal of Mr. Kagan's notion that the United States and Europe have begun to diverge in important ways. "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world," wrote Mr. Kagan. Mr. Hutton, a columnist for London's Observer (where he was once editor in chief), concurs: "The West is at odds as never before," he writes. Unlike Mr. Kagan, though, Mr. Hutton hopes the divide can be bridged.

Mr. Hutton is clear about who needs to do the bridging. His book, which was a best-seller in Britain, was obviously an attempt to convince the British to support European integration. In its slightly adapted American form, A Declaration of Interdependence takes that appeal a step further: Basically, Mr. Hutton wants the U.S. to join the E.U.-or at least to adopt its economic system.

"Interdependence" turns out to be a term that Mr. Hutton applies more to economic policy than to foreign policy. To a large extent, his book is a brief against self-interest, against Adam Smith's "invisible hand," the idea that the larger public interest is served when atomized individuals are allowed to act selfishly. That's not to say that Mr. Hutton is anti-capitalist. But he believes in the moral superiority of European capitalism: highly regulated, with generous unemployment and welfare benefits-what might be called capitalism with a human face.

This is a book about values-"how to construct a just international society and a just capitalism"-and Mr. Hutton is right that policymakers should make normative judgments (essentially, moral judgments) about economic policy that transcend mere analyses of what is most economically efficient (though he disputes as "laissez-faire nostrums" the idea that social spending hampers an economy's performance). Unfortunately, he's not clear about what should replace a technocratic notion of efficiency to inform policy decisions. He says "interdependence" is "the overriding value that I believe should inform domestic and foreign policy." But what is it? How do we define it? How does it guide our decisions? Who decides what is in the fuzzy "public interest" that Mr. Hutton seeks to elevate over self-interest? Why can't Americans make their own decisions about what values should inform policy? Is "extremism in the defense of liberty," to borrow Barry Goldwater's phrase, a vice after all?

Mr. Hutton thinks so, and he implies that his book is part of a project of "de-conservatization" (think de-Baathification, but for Americans), writing that the "strengthening of the American liberal tradition" is a "global concern." But if he wants Americans to reconsider the morality of their economic decisions, he might try a better approach than insulting them. What American wouldn't rally around the flag after reading that American democracy is "a reproach to democratic ideals," that American inequality is "almost medieval in its scope," or that the American dream is "hogwash"? Most Americans will be as befuddled as Texans were by Al Gore's dystopian descriptions of the Lone Star State during the 2000 campaign. You won't recognize the country Mr. Hutton describes. (American conservatism bears "only a tenuous relationship to the core values of Western civilization"?)

Mr. Hutton says that he's not anti-American, only anti-"conservative." But Americans to the right of Ralph Nader will find at least some part of themselves tarred by Mr. Hutton's label. You may nod sympathetically when he says the current political mood in the United States "prevents self-knowledge and intelligent self-criticism," but you'll likely be horrified by the notion that property rights are nothing more than a "concession granted by the state"; or when he pooh-poohs the notion that "the rationale of the state is to protect individual liberties." He derides the "American conservative tradition"-which Americans may think of more broadly as the American tradition-"which holds that America's exceptionalism and economic and social successes are built around independence, individualism, and a ruthless assertion of self-interest." (At one point, Mr. Hutton mysteriously lumps "belief in private property and free enterprise" in with a litany of conservative sins that include "religious fundamentalism, nationalism, prejudice against blacks" and "sexual and social reaction.")

Even those who agree that the state ought to intervene to correct market failures and to protect those who are hurt by the excesses of capitalism will be disappointed with Mr. Hutton's argument. And if you don't already believe that there's a "moral crisis posed by the inequities of income, wealth, and power created by capitalism," Mr. Hutton's book won't do much to convince you otherwise. Instead, you'll find yourself dubbed a racist for supporting welfare reform (placed in quotes as "reform"). Conservatives are the "fanatical" sponsors of "economic degeneration," and their irrational ideas have had a "malevolent impact." Furthermore: "Any rational calculation of the overall costs and benefits of the conservative experiment must give a negative result." Later, Mr. Hutton suggests that the whole of Britain is in the grips of a false consciousness because of conservative ideas, which are "preventing the British from understanding who they are and how they work."

By the end of his book, Mr. Hutton's claims to European moral superiority fall apart. Someone so concerned with the economic status of the downtrodden ought to consider the moral implications of rooting for an American economic collapse: If America's economy gets worse, Mr. Hutton writes, the nation might abandon its "profound cultural attachment to a very particular idea of liberty."

Furthermore, Mr. Hutton's attacks on American unilateralism are weakened by his book's conclusion, in which he virtually argues for a second Cold War: Europe must become an "alternative pole" to the United States, "around which a more enlightened and liberal global order can be formed." The E.U. should go ahead and set up multilateral and international institutions without the United States' approval. Mr. Hutton also argues for greater European defense spending to offset U.S. power.

This endorsement of power through military might, as well as the vigorous promotion of your values in the face of allied opposition and a general sentiment of "Who needs 'em?", sounds remarkably similar to the sentiments that Mr. Hutton criticizes when the speaker's accent is American. But Mr. Hutton's willingness to embrace those sentiments in order to promote his ends provides an unexpectedly hopeful ending: Maybe he and Mr. Kagan are wrong about Americans and Europeans. Perhaps we're from the same planet after all.

Chris Suellentrop is the deputy Washington bureau chief of Slate.

"You lawyers are my angels," proclaims one of the key figures midway through Steven Brill's After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era . Sal Iacono, the man who makes the statement, is thanking his pro bono attorney for securing him an insurance check worth nearly $16,000 to help him rebuild his ailing shoe-repair shop, which was nearly destroyed by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. But the speaker might as well be the author. Mr. Brill (who, among other things, founded The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV) intends his book, at least in part, to be a mash note to the members of the legal profession for their important and patriotic work on behalf of the many victims of 9/11. To be fair, lawyers aren't the only maligned professionals that come in for hagiographic treatment in After . Profit-seeking businessmen, press-hungry politicians and special-interest lobbyists get their due as well, all in support of what is basically a junior-high civics lesson: The American system is based on the idea that the larger public interest is served when self-interested parties pursue their own narrow, selfish interests.

Luckily, the parts of After make up for a less-than-satisfying whole. When Mr. Brill isn't lecturing about his less-than-novel thesis, his book is a meticulously reported and impeccably sourced chronicle of the actions of a few individuals (20 "main characters" and 28 "other key figures") in the year that followed Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Brill structures the book chronologically, relaying bite-sized vignettes from the lives of a handful of characters each day. There's a decent cross-section of figures, from a Border Patrol agent to the C.E.O. of a company that makes luggage-screening equipment to a United States Senator, but by far the most compelling portions of the book concern Eileen Simon, the widow of a Cantor Fitzgerald energy trader. Mr. Brill turns up detail after heartrending detail about her efforts to piece her life together after her husband's death. Her 5-year-old son, Tyler, meets with a therapist and draws pictures of airplanes colliding with buildings. Later, they take a plane trip to Florida, and Tyler asks if he is "higher than Daddy was when he fell." It's not until April 7, 2002, that Eileen can bring herself to replace Michael's voice on the family answering machine. But there are lump-in-the-throat moments in the rest of the book, too. An insurance examiner calls a widow who accepts an insurance payment on her husband's life but promises to return it soon, when "John comes walking through this door."

Unfortunately, when After isn't moving, it's often tedious. Mr. Brill juggles too many characters: He has to check in on some of them now and again even when they're not really doing anything, just to remind you that they still exist. For example, Mr. Brill drops in on Tom Ridge while the newly minted Homeland Security Advisor spends two days reading "two thick black looseleaf volumes." We also get a minute-by-minute account of a day at the White House: "At 8:45, the President briefed his Homeland Security Council, using talking points and PowerPoint slides …. " When Mr. Brill relates that President Bush himself decided that the color-coded terrorism-alert system should use green for its lowest threat level, you're impressed by the reportorial detail, but you're also struggling to stay awake.

Despite the impossibly comprehensive promise of the subtitle, the book's scope is surprisingly narrow, consisting mostly of lawyering (whether it's from John Walker Lindh's defense attorney or plaintiffs' lawyers who specialize in airline disasters), squabbling over insurance payments, and the federal government's work to establish a comprehensive program for homeland security. Rudy Giuliani is virtually absent, as is the anthrax scare. And now that we've just completed the second war of the "September 12 era," Mr. Brill's unexplained decision to completely overlook the response by the defense and foreign-policy establishments in the federal government is puzzling. Readers looking for details on how America confronted Al Qaeda, Osama, the Taliban and Saddam will have to look elsewhere.

Instead, the villains of After (to the extent that there are any) are the Red Cross, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and John Ashcroft. Mr. Brill portrays the Red Cross as an incompetent bureaucracy that's more interested in good press clippings than in aiding the victims of 9/11. It can't get money to families quickly, and when it does, it overcompensates by giving too much money to people who neither need nor deserve it. The I.N.S. is similarly inept ("hapless" is Mr. Brill's adjective of choice). One devastating anecdote illustrates how the agency was more concerned with protecting itself than protecting the country: On Sept. 11, the I.N.S.'s Border Patrol agents in Washington "didn't go out to safeguard Washington's various landmarks and trophy targets. Instead, they fanned out in front of headquarters to prevent an attack on themselves." As for Mr. Ashcroft, the Attorney General comes across as a self-promoting, turf-conscious Beltway insider, sincere in his desire to protect Americans from terrorism but unfamiliar with the fine points of constitutional law, either because of "lack of interest or lack of intellectual firepower." Even F.B.I. agents are "quietly appalled" at Mr. Ashcroft's overreaching and his willingness to trample on civil rights.

But even the villains play a constructive role in Mr. Brill's Panglossian universe. The interplay between law-and-order types like Mr. Ashcroft and civil-liberties ideologues like Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, turns the Sept. 12 era into a Goldilocks story, where nothing is ever too hot or too cold but always just right. Mr. Brill selects Senator Charles Schumer as the personification of the moderate ideal-the 9/12 realization that the balance between freedom and security must be "recalibrated." In the end, Mr. Brill concludes that the Sept. 12 era has a happy ending: Because of this recalibration, the country is safer and more secure than it has ever been.

Mr. Brill concedes that another terrorist attack is nonetheless inevitable. But he asserts that the challenge isn't to stop the next attack. Rather, "the real challenge is to create a set of systems for protection," systems that strike the new Goldilocks balance. In Mr. Brill's view, new government agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security are doing just that. And the self-interested lobbying of everyone from the ACLU to the airlines to homeland-security profiteers will ensure that the nation lives happily ever after. Unfortunately, we really won't know if Mr. Brill is right until the next attack comes. And by then it may be too late.

Chris Suellentrop is the deputy Washington bureau chief for Slate .