"Earnest tomes."

Here's a review of Alan Wolfe's "Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It." The reviewer Gary Rosen reacts to that title with the same ennui I get from it:

When liberal rabble-rousers get fed up with Republican duplicity and Democratic fecklessness, they write books full of invective and rude humor, with titles like ''Stupid White Men'' and ''Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them).'' When liberal intellectuals feel the same impulse, they lash out with paradigms and sprawling historical analogies, in earnest tomes with titles like, well, ''Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It.'' Neither sort of book is especially edifying, but at least Michael Moore and Al Franken deliver an occasional laugh.