WHO STOLE THE SUNSET?

This verbose, obfuscatory and ultimately tedious investigation into contemporary moral crisis never succeeds in identifying the issues -- much less in clarifying their causes. Liston apparently rates the sexual revolution as our number one problem, but his flirting with the theory that the Naked Ape is genetically predisposed to pair bonds and his two page summary of Freud hardly clarifies why we (or perhaps just the advertising media) are obsessed with sex, and never really settles down to evaluate the impact of technology and feminism on sex roles. (Equivocal about nearly every aspect of change, Liston does identify at least one real villain -- homosexuals, a group ""perhaps second only to drug addicts in their eagerness to create other sufferers."") In further chapters Liston condemns materialism, conspicuous consumption, big business rip-offs and Watergate -- all offshoots of either the managerial Process (a concept revived from his Who Really Runs America?, KR, p. 122) or of rampant individualism. Liston raises the specter of the moral anarchy that will overwhelm us if watergaters and street demonstrators continue to elevate ends over means, but his sermonizing attack on both the New Morality and the new immorality is so diffuse and ill-reasoned that he's likely to generate more boredom than outrage.