About 200 people crammed into the Lutheran Heritage Room of Thiel College's Howard Miller Center Thursday night to find out "What's So Great About America," the title of Dinesh D'Souza's newest book.

The nationally known political analyst and New York Times best-selling author kept the crowd, including dozens of interested students from political organizations based on the campuses of Thiel, Grove City and Westminster colleges, spellbound during a nearly two-hour lecture and question and answer session sponsored by the Thiel College Conservatives and the Young America's Foundation.

D'Souza pushed those students to the edge of the intellectual envelope with a whirlwind of commentary ranging from why the schizophrenic-like makeup of America has made it the world's most loved and most hated nation, to suicide bombers and the Islamic culture's view of the West.

D'Souza is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think-tank at Stanford University, who was born and raised in Bombay, India. He is a 1983 Dartmouth graduate and served as a senior domestic policy analyst at the White House during the Reagan administration in 1987-88.

His latest book examines various critiques of America, including "Islamic critique," and makes a case for an "intelligent patriotism" based on an understanding of what makes America unique in the world.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the war on Iraq and even the current prosecution of the "Lackawanna Seven," the Islamic culture has increasingly crept into the consciousness of America. A religion or culture that many Americans knew little about has, in the eyes of many, replaced the old Soviet Union and Iron Curtain countries as America's greatest enemy.