Short reviews of "The American Cinema" by Andrew Sarris, and "Ressentiment" by Max Scheler.
Category: Reviews
Post
What We Are Reading: March 2025
Short reviews of "A Worthy Company" by M. E. Bradford, and "Intelligence in Danger of Death" by Marcel De Corte.
Post
The Religion of Secular Doomsayers
"American Spirit or Great Awokening?" carefully decodes the hidden religious elements of wokeism’s fascination with climate apocalypticism and trans identity. This little book, however, makes some significant missteps.
Post
The Prime Minister Who Loved the Market Too Much
Former-PM Liz Truss' book doubles as a memoir and a stale neo-Thatcherite policy paper. Her politics haven't changed much since the '90s.
Post
The Great America First Conspiracy
Jacob Heilbrunn's "America Last" attempts to undermine the MAGA movement and encourage "the resistance" by discrediting the intellectual history of the America-First right.
Post
Books in Brief: March 2025
Short reviews of 'America First,' by H. W. Brands, and 'The Movement' by Clara Bingham.
Post
A Visual Feast that Fails to Frighten
Though visually dazzling, Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" collapses into caricature and fails to give the audience a good scare.
Post
What We Are Reading: February 2025
Short reviews of 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Robert Burton, and 'Working' by Robert A. Caro.
Post
The Last Acceptable Prejudice
'White Rural Rage' alleges hatred, bigotry, and utter depravity of white, rural, Christians with no real evidence. Of course, there is not a forthcoming 'Black Urban Rage.'
Post
Some Honesty From the Left About Guns
In 'Gun Curious,' a liberal academic who is also a gun owner attempts to locate common ground between left and right and create an area for genuine discussion.
Post
Deconstructing the Colonial Guilt Trip
'On Settler Colonialism' questions whether settler-colonial ideology is just the latest product of the demoralization of the Western world that has gone on since 1914 or whether it is an especially vicious and dangerous development.
Post
Books in Brief: February 2025
Short reviews of How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan by Amin Saikal, and Entrances and Exits, by Michael Richards.
Post
Dramatizing Dietrich
Angel Studios has lionized Dietrich Bonhoeffer into a spy and assassin. That's about as historically accurate as making Mahatma Gandhi into Rambo.
Post
What We Are Reading: January 2025
Short reviews of Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow, and The Immigration Mystique by Chilton Williamson.
Post
The Self-Defeating Nature of Jewish Leftism
The book "The New American Anti-Semitism" underlines the dangers of the American Jewish romance with the political left. Yet it still falls into the old trope of calling all Israel's critics anti-Semites.
Post
Searching for Zion
Rachel Cockerell's quest in "Melting Point" to discover the truth about her great-grandfather has produced not just a family history but a history of the broader search for a Jewish homeland.
Post
The Troubled Upbringing Trend
Rob Henderson's story in "Troubled" follows a recent trend in memoirs: A troubled upbringing entailing various hardships. His story is similar to J. D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy."
Post
Books in Brief: January 2025
Short reviews of Missionary Diplomacy by Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Metaracism by Tricia Rose.
Post
Megalopolis Is a Mega-Flop
Francis Ford Coppola's passion project confusedly tells the story of a minor event in Roman history. The bloated budget and string of mishaps hardly helped to salvage this disaster.
Post
What We Are Reading: December 2024
Short reviews of Napoleon's Pyramids by William Dietrich, and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry.
Post
Judith Butler, Gender Sophist
Judith Butler has made out of her gibberish a lifelong, well-paid gig, and she endeavors to advance her own radical worldview through her sophistical skills.
Post
The Betty Friedan Mystique
Betty Friedan has been portrayed as a hero, but it’s not clear exactly what was so heroic or great about the feminist icon.
Post
Edith Hamilton and the Resurgence of American Education
Edith Hamilton was a hero of the Old Right and of the classical education revival in the U.S. A review of "American Classicist."
Post
The Crime of Noticing
Compared to most writers, both now and in the past, Steve Sailer speaks to the moment and has a firm grasp on what is happening around the world.
Post
Books in Brief: December 2024
Short reviews of Go Woke, Go Broke by Charles Gasparino, and The Indispensable Right by Jonathan Turley.
Post
The Domestic Cruelty of Desire
Last Summer tells the story of Anne, a lawyer and spouse with a seemingly idyllic life, who becomes a predator of sexual domesticity when a long-lost family member resurfaces.
Post
The Next Pope, as Seen Through a Left-Wing Fever Dream
Conclave is a blatant and unabashed piece of artistic manipulation that laughably portrays the Catholic Church from the twisted perspective of the progressive left.
Post
What We Are Reading: November 2024
Short reviews of God Against the Revolution by Gregg L. Frazier, and Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem.
Post
John Bull’s Other Island
Jane Ohlmeyer examines how English imperialism shaped Ireland; tangled alliances and cultural identities complicate the story of the Irish nationalist movement.
Post
Guns of Delusion
Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware partake in academia's mass handwringing over the indigenous “right-wing terror threat”—allegedly represented by the Jan. 6 riot.
Post
The West’s Pivotal Defeat in Ukraine
The West’s failed Ukraine project has forced us to confront a bewildering array of what look like instances of stupidity, verging even on psychosis.
Post
Books in Brief: November 2024
Short reviews of Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life by Joseph Epstein, and Julia by Sandra Newman.
Post
The Anti-Racism Clown Show
Matt Walsh, famed for questioning leftists on gender, now questions leftists on race in his wildly popular documentary, "Am I a Racist?"
Post
What We Are Reading: October 2024
Short reviews of Phenomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas by Giles Sparrow, and Charlotte's Web by E. B. White.
Post
No Terrorism to the Left
'Terrorist Minds' illustrates a consistent blind spot on the part of terrorism scholars—left-wing terrorism.
Post
The Foundations of Faith
Nicholas Orme has had the original idea of treating England's great cathedrals as a single class of cultural architecture, encapsulating the English religious imagination at its most expansive.
Post
Can’t Keep A Great Man Down
John Ganz focuses on American cultural and political wars during the 1990s, when two maverick candidates, Patrick J. Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, rocked the world of staid mainstream conservatism.
Post
Books in Brief: October 2024
Short reviews of Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen, and Adam and Eve after the Pill by Mary Eberstadt.
Post
Can’t We All Just Make Better Movies?
The sheer incongruity of the deceased Ray Liotta appearing in a new release added a hint of fascination to "1992," an otherwise formulaic heist picture produced by rap artist Snoop Dogg.
Post
The Same Old Brilliance and Blind Spots
Thomas Sowell's latest work offers a remix of his greatest hits on race, economics, the "expert" class, but he misses things of interest to those of us on the paleo-right.
Post
Son of Tocqueville, Socrates, and Holmes
If Alexis de Tocqueville, Socrates, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could be combined, such a person would be like Philip Howard. His Everyday Freedom is a well-timed neo-Tocquevillian polemic.
Post
What We Are Reading: September 2024
Short reviews of The Military Condition by Alfred de Vigny, and Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope.
Post
Books in Brief: September 2024
A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, by Dale C. Copeland (Princeton University Press; 504 pp., $31.30). Woodrow Wilson’s April 1917 plea to Congress to “make the world safe for democracy” launched America on a futile messianic crusade that plagues us even today. Nowadays, “safe” includes...
Post
Longlegs and the Unkillable Conservatism of Horror Films
Horror films are filled with conservative themes: Good versus evil, the importance of natural law, the reality of sin. 'Longlegs' is fine example.
Post
What We Are Reading: August 2024
Short reviews of I Believed by Douglas Hyde, and Primal Screams by Mary Eberstadt.
Post
A Jolt from the Slumber of the Self
Werner Herzog, in his new memoir, turns his attention to himself, and singles out essential elements of his life that have given birth to ideas, perceptions, and films.
Post
Doubting Dawkins
Coming to Faith Through Dawkins provides a dozen accounts of former adherents of the Dawkinsian view who became apostates precisely because they looked closely at that dogma.
Post
Elon Musk, Man of Action
Elon Musk's management is hands-on, his tweets are off-the-cuff, and his grudges are enduring. He was made for a storm and cannot stand calm.
Post
Books in Brief: August 2024
Short reviews of New Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God by José Carlos González-Hurtado, and The Paleolibertarian Guide to Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & the Aberrant Economy by Ilana Mercer.
Post
A Gilded Cage for an Old-World Aristocrat
A Gentleman in Moscow follows the life Count Alexander Rostov as he returns to Russia and lives as a dissident under oppressive Soviet rule.