Short reviews of Phenomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas by Giles Sparrow, and Charlotte's Web by E. B. White.
Category: Reviews
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No Terrorism to the Left
'Terrorist Minds' illustrates a consistent blind spot on the part of terrorism scholars—left-wing terrorism.
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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.
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Can’t Keep A Great Man Down
John Ganz focuses on American cultural and political wars during the hectic year 1992, when two maverick candidates, Patrick J. Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, rocked the previously staid presidency of George H. W. Bush.
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Books in Brief: October 2024
Short reviews of Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen, and Adam and Eve after the Pill by Mary Eberstadt.
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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 this otherwise formulaic heist picture, produced by rap artist Snoop Dogg.
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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.
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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.
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What We Are Reading: September 2024
Short reviews of The Military Condition by Alfred de Vigny, and Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope.
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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...
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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.
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What We Are Reading: August 2024
Short reviews of I Believed by Douglas Hyde, and Primal Screams by Mary Eberstadt.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What We Are Reading: June-July 2024
Short reviews of Who Are We?, by Samuel P. Huntington, and Lost Horizon, by James Hilton.
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The New Deal Paved the Way for Today’s Jan. 6 Prosecutions
David Beito’s account of American concentration camps, wartime censorship, mass surveillance, and misuse of executive agencies for partisan political purposes further impugns the claim that FDR was a man of virtue.
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Ding, Dong! The Public School Is Dead
Cara Fitzpatrick chose fear over facts in her account of American public schools. The title, itself, fails living up to reality.
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The War for Western Civilization
The fate of conservative political philosophy depends on the ability of educational institutions to transmit the Western tradition and way of life to students.
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Books In Brief: June-July 2024
Short reviews of The English Experience, by Julie Schumacher, and The Novel, Who Needs It?, by Joseph Epstein.
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‘Civil War’ Shows American Divisions Through a Glass, Darkly
Civil War centers around an imagined conflict within America set in a disturbingly near future or an alternate present.
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What We Are Reading: May 2024
Short reviews of The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield, and Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, by J.W.N. Sullivan.
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Fate, Tragedy, and Repentant Imperialism
Robert Kaplan has distilled the lessons of a life spent in pursuit of tragic knowledge into two books of differing size and scope: The Tragic Mind and The Loom of Time.
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A Pastime Made Politically Correct
Joe Posnanski gets out his sackcloth and ashes and mournfully chants the litany of baseball’s historic racist sins.
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A Book That Needs No Sequel
Rachel Maddow plays up the danger of a reemergence of America’s 1930s and 1940s domestic fascist movements to an absurd extent.
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Books in Brief: May 2024
Short reviews of Bartleby & Me by Gay Talese and Southern Poets and Poems, 1606 -1860: The Land They Loved by Clyde N. Wilson.
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American Fiction Is American Reality
'American Fiction' has penetrated the thick permafrost that wokesters have imposed on our cultural landscape.
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What We Are Reading: April 2024
Short reviews of On Resistance to Evil by Force, by Ivan Ilyin, and Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert.
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The Expanding Civil Rights Bureaucracy
American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime is the definitive study on the transformative ramifications of the 1960s civil rights legislation.
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The Quintessential Hollywood Affair
'Bogie & Bacall' explores the dichotomy between the image of a perfect Hollywood couple and the dark reality of one of the most famous marriages in Hollywood.
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What’s in a Naomi?
'Doppelganger' centers around Naomi Klein's personal grievance: Being mistaken for Naomi Wolf.
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Books in Brief: April 2024
Short reviews of The Myth of Left and Right by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis, and Myth America by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer.
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Conservatives for the Working Class
In "Tyranny Inc.," Sohrab Ahmari calls out the hypocrisy of today’s American economy, which enriches unaccountable oligarchs, exploits workers, and undermines democracy.
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From Myth to Mob Rule and Back Again
In this discussion of 11 critics of contemporaneity, Neema Parvini is unsentimental about human nature, scornful of pabulum, and armed with mordant wit.
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What We Are Reading: March 2024
Short reviews of Vergil: Father of the West, by Theodor Haecker, and The Sociological Tradition, by Robert A. Nisbet.
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George Kennan: Gadfly and Insider
There is a lot more to George Kennan than his policy of Soviet containment. This influential man, who never held a real position of power, was a bundle of contradictions.
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Books in Brief: March 2024
Short reviews of George Kennan for Our Time by Lee Congdon, and Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein.
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The Winding Passage Back to Plato
In The Narrow Passage, Glenn Ellmers reminds readers of the need for a robust understanding of nature in any well-grounded conservatism.
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The Barefooted Faulkner
Faulkner’s work was deeply embedded in the oral tradition of the south, and has a strong sense of place.
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What We Are Reading: February 2024
Short reviews of The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
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The Fires of America’s Cultural Revolution Were Already Burning
Christopher Rufo excavates several unpleasant and destructive left-wing thought streams that are eroding the social order on which we all depend. His prescriptions for action are convincing, though it is less certain whether his diagnosis is accurate.
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Books in Brief: February 2024
Short reviews of From Immigrant to Public Intellectual, by Murray Sabrin, and The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, by Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer.
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The Empire State of Mind
Nigel Biggar's sophisticated history of British colonialism does not ignore the many benefits reaped by the recipients. His work is relevant to all Western nations, now threatened by faux radicals.
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A Conservative Self-Critique
The Up From Conservatism anthology contains some insightful, biting critiques of the conservative establishment, but its contributors are part of an elite class themselves, with their own sacred cows and taboos.
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What We Are Reading: January 2024
Short reviews of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, by Franz Neumann; Counter Wokecraft, by Charles Pincourt and James Lindsay; Love and the Genders by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn; and, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson.
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Out of the Toxic Fog of Feminist Anger
Domestic Extremist is a book we desperately need, hitting all the right keys and in the breezy, entertaining tone familiar to anyone who has read its author online.
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Books in Brief: January 2024
Short reviews of The Making of White American Identity by Ron Everyman, The Weaponization of Loneliness by Stella Morabito, and The Significance of the German Revolution by Edgar Julius Jung.
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What We Are Reading: December 2023
Short reviews of Broken Record, by Roy Campbell, and The World Crisis, by Winston S. Churchill.