The book was heavy on polemics equating moral virtue and civic responsibility with military service.

WSJ: -

" After years of suffering polemics, Abou El Fadl told me, "al-Ghazali died of a broken heart.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: How the Saudis control the voice of Islam in America

Inevitably bulky, given its scope, his book is so bloated by asides, digressions, polemics and hobbies that it is positively obese, and this makes it a hard book to review justly.

ECONOMIST: A master of evolution takes a last long look at Darwin

He was an occasionally observant if less than pious Catholic who became part of that circle of secular, mostly Jewish New York intellectuals whose style of thought and expression, if not their current politics, was rooted in the polemics of the kind of exotic Marxist radicalisms that never tempted him.

NEWYORKER: Politics and Prose