Bruce Bawer
While Europe Slept (2006) skeptically examined the rise of Islamism and sharia in the Western world, and The Victims' Revolution (2012) was a criticism of academic identity studies.
While in graduate school, he published essays in Notes on Modern American Literature[6] and the Wallace Stevens Journal,[7] and opinion pieces in Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times.
Reviewing the book in The New Criterion, James Atlas called the "character analyses... shrewdly intuitive and sympathetic", found Bawer's "explanation for why the poets of the Middle Generation were so obsessed with [T.S.]
Reviewing it in the Chicago Tribune, Jack Fuller complained of "sour notes", such as "undeserved sneers", but concluded that "What redeems Bawer's excesses is the persuasive case he makes that he is on a desperate rescue mission.
In The New York Times Book Review, Andrea Barnet described the book as "immensely readable... provocative and entertaining", saying that Bawer was "thoughtful, sharply opinionated, high-minded and unafraid to slash at sacred cows",[17] Leslie Schenk of World Literature Today opined that Bawer "has the uncanny knack of writing good sense precisely in those fields where good sense seems to have been taboo... As though with the scalpel of a surgeon removing tumors, he deftly, coolly, cuts through the ephemeral malarkey that hitherto obscured his subjects.
[28] The book, which criticized both heterosexuals' antigay prejudices and the political and cultural stereotypes which, in his view, were foisted on many gay people by the "queer subculture", received much attention.
'"[31] The book received positive reviews by James P. Pinkerton in Newsday,[32] John Fink in the Chicago Tribune ,[33] David Link in Reason,[34] and Lee Dembart in the Los Angeles Times.
[40] A Place at the Table was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in the category of Gay Men's Studies[41] and was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, which described it as a "sharply argued polemic".
"[31] In a 2019 article commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, James Kirchick referred to A Place at the Table as "the integrationist founding text".
[43] On an episode of the Charlie Rose Show marking the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, Bawer took part in a discussion with fellow gay moderate Andrew Sullivan and gay-left writers Tony Kushner and Donna Minkowitz.
"[44] A New York Public Library lecture by Bawer, also marking the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, appeared in abbreviated form as a cover story in the New Republic.
Bawer retorted, in part: "Well, most gays do live next door to straight people... we're not putting down cross-dressers or leathermen or anyone else; we're simply refuting an extremely misleading stereotype.
Reviewing it for Salon, he described it as a book written from "the heart of Academic Country, where the very existence of conservatives who are not straight white males can indeed generate horror and confusion (or, alternatively, amusement, perhaps bordering on clinical hysteria), and where, as surely as a multiplicity of genders, skin colors, ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations is the collective dream, a multiplicity of viewpoints is the collective nightmare".
He described Dillard's account of "gay conservative" as ill-informed and criticized her for, among other things, including him on "a list of people who have 'sided with the Religious Right'—even though I wrote Stealing Jesus (1997), which indicts fundamentalism as a betrayal of Christianity".
Peter Kurth complained at Salon on November 30, 1998, that "Bruce Bawer, Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, and the inevitable Larry Kramer have, with [Andrew] Sullivan and a few others, secured a virtual lock on gay commentary in the American media.
[58] Ron Hayes, writing in The Palm Beach Post, called it "complex, unsettling and thought provoking" and maintained that "No straight person who reads these essays will ever assume all gays are liberal again.
[41][better source needed] Looking back on the book in 2007, James Kirchick of the New Republic said that it had been "perhaps the most important work of gay nonfiction since Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On".
While criticizing "Bawer's sometimes strident tone", Publishers Weekly said that his "graceful prose and lucid insights make this a must-read book for anyone concerned with the relationship of Christianity to contemporary American culture".
[62] Walter Kendrick, in The New York Times, noted that like A Place at the Table, Stealing Jesus was an "alarm bell", in this case about Christian fundamentalism.
"The thesis of Stealing Jesus is an antinomian heresy rooted in gnostic dualism about the flesh and spirit", pronounced Catholic priest George W. Rutler in National Review, suggesting that "Bawer could some day write something about the real Church, if he read St. Francis de Sales's Treatise on the Love of God, spent a few days in Lourdes, and quieted down with a good cigar.
[66] In a 1998 article about Robert Duvall's film The Apostle, Bawer expressed surprise "that a movie with such a dark, realistic texture... should candy-coat the religious subculture in which it is set".
[67] In a 1998 review of New York Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore's autobiography, Bawer described him as "a more complex figure than the privileged lefty portrayed by his critics".
In a 2004 New York Times article about American attitudes toward Europe, Richard Bernstein quoted a recent Hudson Review essay in which Bawer said, in Bernstein's paraphrase, "that for a time he thought about writing a book lamenting American anti-intellectualism, indifference to foreign languages and academic achievement, and susceptibility to trash TV", but in the end "didn't write that book... because he discovered that Europe wasn't so comparatively fantastic after all".
In his conclusion, Bawer states that rising birthrates among Muslims and their "refusal" to integrate will allow them to dominate European society within 30 years, and that the only way to avoid such a disaster is to abolish the politically correct and multicultural doctrines that, according to him, are rife within the continent.
The President of the Circle, John Freeman, declared: "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept", and claimed that "[I]ts hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia.
[86] In Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009), Bawer argued "that people throughout the Western world—in reaction to such events as the Danish cartoon riots and the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh—are surrendering to fear" and thus censoring themselves and others and "refus[ing] to criticize even the most illiberal aspects of Islamic culture", thereby "undermin[ing] the values of individual liberty and equality on which our nation was founded".
Publishers Weekly said that while Bawer's "critique seldom engages seriously with the intellectual content of the field", his book was "a lively, cantankerous takedown of a juicy target" that scored "lots of entertaining points against the insufferable posturing and unreadable prose that pervades identity studies".
[94] National Review's Jay Nordlinger, on the other hand, praised the book's "wonderfulness" and wrote: "I wish people would read The Victims' Revolution.
"[95] After moving to Europe, Bawer worked for a time as a columnist and translator for the website of Human Rights Service, an Oslo-based think tank focused on immigration and integration issues.
[99] The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate about Islam (2012) is an e-book by Bawer about the aftermath of the mass murders committed by Anders Behring Breivik on July 22, 2011.
