Christine T. Sistare (ed.), Civility and Its Discontents: Essays on Civic Virtue, Toleration, and Cultural Fragmentation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), x + 310 pp. The volume Civility and Its Discontents is an eclectic collection of 15 essays divided into 3 parts (Civic Virtue, Toleration, and Cultural Fragmentation). To the volume as a whole the editor, Christine Sistare, has contributed a useful general preface, and to each section she has written an extensive introduction. In both of these ways she has helped to gather up and to hold together this otherwise disparate collection of reflections on the topics of civility and (the stability of) civil society. The volume has an index but no general bibliography. However, the often extensive notes to each contribution, as well as the notes to the preface and the section introductions, provide a workable presentation of some but not all of the basic literature on this broad, important, yet diffuse topic.
