The End of Time by David Horowitz

Author David Horowitz is perhaps best known for changing his mind. An avowed Marxist during the 1960s and '70s, he was a leader of the radical student protests that railed against the establishment, the Vietnam War, and all authority in general. But when a close friend of his was murdered by the Black Panthers during the 1970s, it called into question everything he thought he knew. The soul-searching that followed transformed him from a hero of the Left to a leading conservative thinker and writer, and a reviled figure among his former ideological cohorts.

Decades later, Horowitz is still soul-searching, still questioning. In his latest book, The End of Time, he goes beyond politics to ponder--there is no other way to say it--the meaning of life. The spectre of imminent death focuses the mind like nothing else, he writes, as his recent battles with prostate cancer have made clear.

It is not a cheery read. Horowitz is a man of towering intellect, yet for all his brilliance, he cannot discern his own fate any more than an illiterate man can. Neither can politics, the human endeavor to which he has most devoted himself, provide any fulfillment. The fanatical drive to reshape the world--whether it be by the hand of the radical jihadist or the atheistic secularist--is the cause of untold suffering. Earthly politics, even if it is divinely inspired, cannot penetrate the dark recesses of the human heart.

Faced with these bleak conclusions, Horowitz finds a small measure of solace in the love of his young wife, April, although he fears that even she will be lost to him as the relentless march of time draws him ever closer to the abyss of death. She is a woman of faith, and she urges him to share in it, but he struggles to believe.

The End of Time mirrors the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes in its grim tone and philosophical musings, but without its conclusion of fealty to a knowable, personal God. "The recognition of consequences," Horowitz writes, "is the beginning of wisdom." That is a maxim that holds as true for this world as it does for the next.