Books like Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

I was impressed by the introduction to this highly touted book. His central point, that the 'reason' of the Enlightenment age, and to which we modern westerners pay lip service, has run amok, that our world is run by soulless technocrats, is not new, but I was eager to see what ammo he brought to bear.Alas, what I found was a personal essay masquerading as a historical overview. Page after page of unsupported opinion offered as fact, sometimes as judgments about individuals. I kept asking myself "Where did he get that about Richelieu?" "Paoli's Revolution directly led to the French Revolution? Really? Really?"When I got to his blithe summation of Metternich's intentions (and those of the other chief players at the Congress in 1814) I was shaking my head; the author was almost writing fiction, certainly opinion, and absolutely none of it footnoted. Did he use any primary sources? Even his pronouncements about literature were suspect, for example when he airily says that Flaubert intended the reader to identify with Madame B. Um, no. He got it right about how this was a new twist in the stream of literature, but (according to Nabokov, who has read extensively in Flaubert's letters, etc) Flaubert was absolutely appalled when a woman wrote to him saying how closely she'd identified with E.B.--Flaubert was writing a modern novel in which the characters were butterflies pinned to a board for the reader to examine. Identifying was not in the equation.Saul also throws off a prediction that The Big Sleep and one of Chandler's other novels will be read in a hundred years while Barth will be forgotten. While I don't particularly care for Barth either, and the point about writing for an elite is well taken, are our descendents really going to have such a paucity of literature that they will reaching back for white guy shoot-'em-ups, however tautly written?I'd say that Saul's more sure of his ground in modern times, and his points should be taken into consideration by anyone trying to figure out how we got in the hellish mess we're in now. But his historical and literary referents? Trainloads of salt!