Wonder Boy

Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, by Jedediah Purdy (Knopf, $24, 352 pp.)

Jedediah Purdy, the American Left’s winsome scourge of irony, is a great one for name-dropping. In the course of a three-page preface to this book, he cites Burke, Tocqueville, Shakespeare, and Hannah Arendt; by page 50, he has added Yeats, Whitman, Hamilton, Jefferson, Thoreau, Adam Smith, Oakeshott, the Buddha, Emerson, Montesquieu, and Augustine.