"Either America is the hope of the world, or it is nothing. Th ere are those who have begun to despair of the West. It is for them that I am writing." Bruckberger's book has been compared by many to Tocqueville's Democracy in America. In both works, Americans see themselves through the sympathetic, sometimes critical eyes of a Frenchman. Bruckberger, as chaplain general of the French Resistance during World War II, was a scholar who lived a life of action, and a priest who knew the life of the spirit. He begins with a celebration of the American past, but also off ers a clear...