Rotberg is the author of the controversial novel, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author and the critique of Vancouver's political culture and absence of policies to promote social justice and affordable housing, entitled Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada's Lotus Land.

Rotberg is a values based cultural critic analyzing policy from the point of view of ideologies and foundational values. This makes him quite unique in the Vancouver writing community.

Mr. Rotberg is the author whose prescient first book, a novel, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author attracted Islamist anger, and an 18 year old Palestinian book clerk at Chapters (Canada's monopoly book chain) successfully got it banned by Chapters (which had been carrying 7 copies per store) by fabricating a lie - that Rotberg at a bookstore lecture had said something to the effect that "all Muslims are terrorists" which position she later changed, when requested to put it in writing, to a claim that he said "all Middle Easterners are terrorists" both of which were denied by Rotberg and in affidavits by professors who attended. Rotberg has persevered and his new book on the ideology plaguing the west is a "must read".

Rotberg's new book argues that a tradition of tolerance has morphed into an undue deference and leniency for those illiberals who would take away our freedoms, combined with a self-hatred of the liberal democratic tradition in the west, which he calls the ideology of "Tolerism". He argues that Justice must often trump tolerance, and that we must discuss what are the limits of tolerance.

Mantua Books
Vancouver B.C. and Brantford Ontario

-- Publisher Press release