About the Author

Bruce Bawer's book While Europe Slept was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of A Place at the Table, Stealing Jesus, and several books of literary criticism, including Diminishing Fictions and The Aspect of Eternity. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post Book World, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Wilson Quarterly, City Journal, and many other periodicals. Visit the author's website at www.brucebawer.com.

Reviews

Bawer (While Europe Slept) argues that, in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism, critics of radical Islam are being silenced by left-leaning academics, politicians and journalists. He argues that self-censorship has become widespread in the Western press, referring to outcry following the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's 2005 publication of cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad, when many international news outlets debated whether the paper had the right to print them in the first place-an attack on freedom of the press coming from within its own ranks. While Bawer does an admirable job of rooting out hypocritical statements made by pundits and politicians, readers might wince at his pronounced anti-Muslim bias-he claims that Muslim immigrants to the West are in a war to snuff out free speech and equal rights. Bawer's thought-provoking arguments are overshadowed by his shrill condemnations and a cranky attack on those who paint him as a polarizing figure. The book would have been helped had the author remembered his own statement, made early in the book: "Free speech doesn't mean immunity from criticism." (May) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

Praise for Surrender:

"Bawer is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply terrifying."
-The New York Times Book Review

"An alarming, depressing, brilliant and remarkably courageous book. Bawer's conclusion is bleak but uncompromising."
-Martin Sieff, The Washington Times

"Sublimely literate and rational. . . . An immensely important and urgent book."
-Booklist (starred review)

"Written with an urgency and clarity that makes it hard to stop reading and re-reading it. It should be studied by all who wish to understand the forces at work in the West that make an Islamic 'House of Peace' a brewing nightmare."
-Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel

Praise for While Europe Slept:

"A must-read book."
-Philadelphia Inquirer

"A clarion call for the West to understand the radical threat to our freedoms from politicized fundamentalist Islam."
-Andrew Sullivan

"Indispensable. . . . A portrait of a powder keg continent."
-Raleigh News & Observer

"If you want to understand the car burnings, the killings over cartoons and films, and other outrages sure to come, you won't do any better than While Europe Slept."
-Rocky Mountain News