Democracy's Literature is the most recent foray by political philosophers to save literature from itself, or at least to save good books from Departments of English. At the same time, as coeditor Joseph Romance suggests in the conclusion to his own essay, such an undertaking throws a lifeline to narrow-minded political scientists, urging them—if I may paraphrase Flannery O'Connor—to meet political perplexities with an examination of conscience rather than an examination of statistics. And it is this political examination of conscience that literature will often facilitate.

These essays, as a group, ably demonstrate the way in which good books improve our understanding of politics. For example, the most frequent theme in this collection is the tangled political dilemmas that America's tragic racial history poses to citizens and leaders alike, and the need for political efforts to be grounded in an appreciation of the transcendent dimension of political and personal life.

Not only does Romance's fine insightful essay on William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust help us to understand Faulkner's contribution to an understanding of our race relations, but the essay is also balanced between an exegesis of the novel and an analysis of the political problem so as to provide a model of just what this genre of political writing should be. Wilson Carey McWilliams illuminates James Baldwin's contribution to the race problem by explaining that Baldwin would inspire us through his literature to approach such conundrums with “faith,” and by insisting that in spite of his angry politics, he nonetheless wrote out of a love for his country.

Pamela Jensen's discussion of Ralph Ellison's prose and fiction is equally perspicacious in demonstrating the complexities (and promises) of our national quest for equality and unity in America. Both Romance and Jensen remind us that if citizens are to change their country for the better, they must love it—not hate it. Hate multiplies sins; love covers a multitude of the same. Less known to readers is the focus of Lawrie Balfour's essay, namely, Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred. Balfour's chapter, though, convinces us that Butler deserves her place, that her fiction enables us to accommodate ourselves appropriately to the “memory” of slavery, which if forgotten, weakens our resolve to deal today with its consequences.

These essays, however, are not confined to the theme of slavery and racism. In his insightful essay on Flannery O'Connor's biting short story “Good Country People,” Peter Lawler reminds us that the only sure antidote to the prevalent nihilism of our day is intelligent faith. Smug, arrogant secularism is simply too vulnerable to philosophical currents that cannot be understood—and withstood—without reference to something beyond ourselves.

Paul Cantor cleverly turns the tables on anti-Western, postcolonial literary criticism by arguing that Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, perhaps the very first “postcolonial” novel, is a constructive criticism of the Western tradition, written from within the Western tradition itself. Perhaps most insightful is his suggestion that the child becomes father to the parent insofar as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America inspired political reform in England.

Catherine Zuckert's chapter on Tom Sawyer takes its cue from Twain's own suggestion that his creation, once grown up, might occupy the same desk as Teddy Roosevelt. Her explanation of Sawyer's political education, however, concludes that we must resign ourselves not to expect disinterested political leaders. On the contrary, as Lincoln warns in his speech to the Young Men's Lyceum, the country will never be relieved of the worry of self-interested political ambition, a lesson Zuckert draws from Twain's ironic novel.

Moving even farther away from recognized “canons” of literature, the last two chapters deal, respectively, with the graduation speeches of acclaimed novelist Kurt Vonnegut and the contemporary dystopian novel White Noise (1985). Since this collection is firmly anchored by its essays on canonical literature, there is room left for these final two essays, even if the literature they examine is not “classic.” They are worth reading in their own right; what is more, their addition puts the lie to the charge that the Western canon is static and reactionary.

Readers (and publishers) have become less patient than they once were with edited collections, having tired of the inevitable variability of style and quality that even good editors cannot overcome. Democracy's Literature, though, is worth the reader's effort, given its thematic unity and talented contributors. The editors make a small misstep in their introduction. They quote Laura Bush's response to the White House boycott by several literary scholars who, troubled by the war in Iraq, spurned the president's invitation to a gathering in honor of literature. The first lady responded, “There's nothing political about literature.” Patrick Deneen and Romance protest that “nothing could be further from the truth.” Although they attempt to qualify their disagreement with the first lady, Laura Bush is exactly right: Good literature is never “political” in the sense of its being pretexts for partisan politics. On the other hand, time-tested literature is profoundly political, in that it speaks to our perennial democratic challenges with insight, elegance, and truth—as this collection so expertly demonstrates.

Two of the authors in the Deneen and Romance volume (Cantor and Lawler) join nine others in Political Philosophy Comes To Rick's: Casablanca and American Civic Culture, an imaginative text that treats cinema in a manner befitting its status, namely, as the new literary genre. Cantor's essay makes the text worth buying, Lawler's confirms the wisdom of the purchase, and several of the other essays make as strong a case as can be made that this classic film is a worthy study by historians, philosophers, and political philosophers. The immensely popular classic, second only to Citizen Kane, seems an unlikely inspiration for scholarly activity. Indeed, Paul Cantor warns that popular culture should be taken seriously—but not too seriously. Though at times uneven in style from one chapter to another, the essays as a whole are seriously undertaken by capable scholars, and the work thus deserves a place on the shelf of political scientists, movie buffs, and anyone else seeking serious entertainment. Even if Casablanca, at its inception, was only meant to entertain and return a handsome profit, James Pontuso convincingly argues that those who produced it have provided entertainment that tells us something about the “permanent passions, interests, duties, and questions inherent to the human condition” (p. 3).