American Power gathers together seven transcribed “talks” from the first two seasons of the invitation-only Grano Speakers Series, held in an upscale Toronto restaurant over the past few years. The list of speakers is extraordinary – included are such luminaries as political scientist Samuel Huntington, polemicist Christopher Hitchens, journalist Robert Kaplan, and Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. Whether or not one agrees with these people (most tend to the rightward end of the political spectrum), they all continue to play important roles in defining, developing, and interpreting American power in this century.

The intent of the series’ founders (who are the book’s editors) was to “return to the tradition of the intellectual ‘salon,’” where speakers of note hold forth in a casual environment. It is a lovely idea that, alas, does not translate well into book form. The transcriptions are too short to be truly informative, and too disparate for a reader to develop a cohesive picture of the issue at hand. Furthermore, a great mind does not an off-the-cuff public speaker make – historian John Lukacs, for example, rambles alarmingly far from his topic.

Though the earliest talk is less than three years old, much of the collection is already history, with some of the speakers’ positions bound for the proverbial dustbin. Western Standard editor William Kristol’s apologia for the invasion of Iraq is a case in point. And although the book claims eight transcribed talks, the editors apparently couldn’t get permission to include Bernard Lewis’s. So for some baffling reason, they have substituted a Lewis article on anti-Semitism – which is not entirely within the bounds of the series or this book.

If you were one of the 120 elect invited to attend the salons, American Power would make a nice memento. For everyone else, regular reading of op-ed pages would reap more reward.