[10] The book argues that "Americans have become overly complacent with the world around us, particularly the ideological conflicts between Islam and the West, as a result of our desire to perpetuate our youth.
"[2] A Kirkus review said the book "offers a bright, readable, often overwrought indictment of a popular culture that keeps Americans in a state of perpetual adolescence".
[11] Christopher Orlet, writing in the American Spectator, argued that "West does not advocate a return to some golden pre-war era, but she does prescribe a booster shot of old-fashioned adult values.
"[2] Writing in The New York Times Book Review, William Grimes observed that "West makes a principled, conservative cultural argument unflinchingly" throughout the text.
[14] She argues that infiltration of the American government by Stalinist agents and fellow-travelers had significantly altered Allied policies in favor of the Soviet Union during World War II.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. finds that West "painstakingly documents how America's government, media, academia, political and policy elites actively helped obscure the true nature of the Soviet Union.
Like Radosh, Black believes West grossly exaggerates Soviet influence in the Roosevelt Administration, whose policies were driven by the extreme social and economic crisis America was going through during the Depression.
Black believes the alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II, while driven by realpolitik, was a dire necessity to prevent the victory of Nazi Germany which had already conquered France and was threatening Britain, and finds West's dismissal of the D-Day invasion of Normandy as somehow the result of Soviet subterfuge to shift the strategic thrust from the campaign in Italy to be an absurd and amateurish contention that ignores the realities of logistics and terrain.
[16] Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes claim West made serious historical errors, the most egregious being that Harry Hopkins was the Soviet spy "source 19" named in the Venona transcripts, who they believe the evidence shows was actually Laurence Duggan, a U.S. Department of State official.