How much does identity drive our point of view and our right to assert it?

Kwame Anthony Abia will be here to discuss his latest book, The Lies That Bind.

Why are college students today so unprepared for life on campus?

And what are the implications for their lives afterward?

Jonathan Hight will be here to talk about his new book, The Coddling of the American Mind.

Alexander Alter will give us an update from the publishing world,

plus we'll talk about what we and the wider world are reading.

This is the Book Review Podcast from The New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Kwame Anthony Abia joins us now. He is the ethicist column for The New York Times magazine

and his latest book is called The Lies That Bind, Rethinking Identity. Anthony, thanks for

being here. It's very good to be here. To what extent does identity currently shape our social,

cultural, and political discourse? I think very deeply and that's not terribly new. I think it's

been doing it for a long time. Indeed, if you take nationality to be kind of identity and nationalism

to be a kind of politics, then we've been doing a kind of identity politics ever since the beginning

of the Republic. But I think when people talk about the new rise of identity, what they have in

mind is that a whole bunch of other identities, which were not widely regarded as salient to politics,

say in the middle of the 20th century, like race, gender, sex, or orientation, maybe religion,

to some extent, have kind of come to the center of our politics in an interesting way. I think it's a

mistake to suggest that we could do politics without identity, as I said. We're a nation. We could

only do things together if we care about being Americans, and that's an identity. What I think people

are maybe have a case for complaining about is when we use identities to ill purpose. But using

them a tool, I think it's no point of being against using them a tool. But it has shifted in terms

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