The organising principle of this absorbing collection of essays is the assertion that to approach contemporary American thought and culture viewing the events of 9/11 as a convenient break with the past would be a mistake.  The editors and contributors do not deny that the trauma of 9/11 transformed aspects of government policy (such as the 2001 Patriot Act) and public debate (the resurgence of the rhetoric of civil religion, for example), but they do insist that much of what characterises the life of the United States at the present time has its roots in the 1990s in particular, and indeed the various social, political and cultural strains that have been in evidence for centuries. 

Halliwell and Morley marshal a wide range of contributions into three discrete sections.  The first of these tackles politics, including pieces from Dominic Sandbrook and Kevin Mattson nuancing the 'culture of consensus' formulations familiar to those with a knowledge of 1950s America.  Both suggest that contemporary conservatives and liberals alike (the reds and the blues of the 'culture wars') are actually defined as much by their similarities as by their differences, not only in their stance on social issues such as abortion, but also in their willingness to embrace what Mattson terms a 'new media landscape that blur[s]... the line between news and opinion', resulting in the employment of relativist views of truth in the pursuit of absolutist ends.  Six essays pertaining to issues of 'society' follow, tackling topics ranging from the environment and technology to religion, medicine and globalisation.  In the most striking of these, Howard Brick shows how any conception of America's place in a globalised world must take into account the country's enduring uncertainty over the desirability of a culture that either looks inward or appeals in cosmopolitan language to the rest of the world.  The essay also reminds us that globalisation is a process that both 'integrate[s]' and 'fracture[s]' and that the United States will continue to struggle with balancing supranational problems and internal issues of political self-determination.  The collection's final section outlines the cultural currents flowing through contemporary American life, ranging over literature, animated films and television and photography in the digital age.  Here the emphasis is on the way in which certain longstanding narratives in American culture (the captivity narrative, Life founder Henry Luce's notion of an 'American Century') have been problematised by technological innovation and the implications of waging war against the abstraction of 'terror'.  In her piece, Catherine Morley describes how fiction writers have been forced to imagine 'counternarratives' in order to 'wrestle [back] power from the terrorist' and comprehend America's changed place in the world.  At the same time, Morley also locates two of post-9/11 American fiction's key themes - the decline of the family and the 'de-establishment' of the middle-class - in the pre-9/11 context of the 90s when consumer debt rose dramatically.

The eighteen essays in this volume provide a stimulating starting point in any consideration of contemporary American thought and culture with the important intellectual contributions of figures such as Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman all being absorbed into the analyses in interesting ways.  It's a shame that the book's U.K. publication pre-dated Barack Obama's election as president as this renders some of the commentary regarding, for example, the persistence of a widespread Republican voting bloc and the poverty of much political rhetoric in the U.S. as already out of date.  However, such claims run the risk of positing Obama's victory as another historical caesura and, as American Thought and Culture in the 21^st Century clearly demonstrates, such an approach entails its own risks.