Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos is the most recent entry into a genre that seeks to resolve contemporary problems by unearthing eternal truths from the Western canon. Notable prior efforts include David Brooks’ The Road to Character and William J. Bennett’s The Book of Virtues. I am not sure if this genre has a name, but I’ll give it one: “McGuffey.” I use this title because the genre is something of a reinvention of McGuffey Readers but for adults rather than 19th century American Protestant schoolchildren.
In the McGuffey genre, the author arranges a cast of canonical figures as spokespeople for certain noble ideas, using them to take the reader on a tour of the tradition. McGuffeys vary a bit in content and composition. Where Bennett offers readers short interpretive prefaces in a collection of primary sources, Brooks provides his readers an overview of the sources, with short quotations. Ahmari adopts Brooks’ style.
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