taught music and continued to perform and compose. Ricardo Duchesne's uncle, José "Keko" Luis Duchesne Landrón, was a saxophonist and a member of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico from 1969 to 1980. Ricardo Duchesne is married to the dance choreographer Georgia Rondos. They have two children. Ideas The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Themes Duchesne's first book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, published in 2011, criticizes the work of world historians, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, who he argues portray history in terms that support the egalitarian idea that all cultures are equally significant, devaluing Western civilization and its contributions in the process. Duchesne challenges historians, such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Roy Bin Wong, whose work posits Chinese economic and intellectual pre-eminence prior to 1800, and maintains that the culture of the West has always been "in a state of variance from the world" at least since classical antiquity, characterized by multiple divergences, successive revolutions, and continuous creativity in all fields of human endeavor. He traces the West's restlessness and creative spirit to what he characterizes as the unique aristocratic culture of Indo-Europeans, with its ethos of heroic individualism, weaker kinship ties, war bands bound together by voluntary oaths of loyalty and fraternity, and its original pastoral package of wheeled vehicles, horse-riding, and chariots. Reception A number of academics and historians praised Duchesne's writing in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, noting in particular the breadth of scholarship demonstrated throughout the book. Martin Hewson, politics and international studies professor at the University of Regina, points to Duchesne's The Uniqueness of Western Civilization as the leading book in what he describes as a trend toward "post-multicultural history". Hewson states that "The main achievement of post-multicultural world history is to have established that there were numerous critical non-economic divergences between Europe and other regions. The West was both peculiar and inventive across many domains." David Northrup, noted that "although The Uniqueness of Western Civilization may well upset or infuriate world historians, they have much to gain from reading it, since it presents summaries and critiques of a great many works in comparative world, European, and Asian history." Steve Balch, Director of The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University, said "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization is old-school scholarship at its best: consequential, closely reasoned, richly evidenced, and professionally courteous." Eric Jones wrote that The Uniqueness of