Category: Reviews

The pro-life movement today almost completely identifies with the Republican Party, despite its support by a few Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey (sometimes).  It wasn’t always so. In 1972, at the age of 17, I worked against Michigan’s Measure B, which would have legalized abortion in the state.  It lost, with 61 percent...

Prospective readers should not be put off by the words “women writers” in the title of this book.  Catharine Savage Brosman’s emphasis is not on the ideological but rather on the intellectual and artistic identity of her subjects, which complement the masculine sensibilities of their male counterparts—Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lea, John S. Van...

According to pious American folklore, there was in 1787 a “Miracle at Philadelphia” in which demigod Founding Fathers gathered and gave the world the “U.S. Constitution”; thereby, as chanted by former Chief Justice Burger in a juvenile bicentennial panegyric, they changed human history forever—and got rid of the awful Articles of Confederation, which stood in...

“Little lamb, Who made thee?” —William Blake This latest is vintage Tom Wolfe.  As in Radical Chic and The Painted Word, he casts his uniquely probing eye on fashionable orthodoxy and its establishment priests—in this case the strange religious cult of evolution.  While evolution may presume, sometimes dubiously, to describe the world, it can explain...

The Mirror Test is John Kael Weston’s testament and witness to seven years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Weston worked as a State Department political officer alongside U.S. Marines and Army soldiers in some of the most dangerous areas of both countries, advising—and sometimes overruling—American military commanders in what became political nation-building operations growing...

Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America, by James E. Campbell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 313 pp., $29.95).  This book is probably too academic to suit the taste of the general reader.  It is, however, eminently sensible and notably well written for an academic text.  Campbell argues that the polarization of American politics began...

As both Drutman and Katz emphasize, before the 1970’s lobbying in America was a paltry enterprise.  In the immediate postwar era, under the pro-business Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, few companies hired in-house lobbyists; instead, they worked through trade associations or independent lobbying firms.  Under Lyndon Johnson regulatory legislation addressed a host of social and economic...

Who would have thought that, 20 years after Pat Buchanan’s failed presidential bid, a billionaire New York real-estate developer and reality-television star would win the Republican presidential nomination running on the same issues Buchanan campaigned on in 1996, and with the same unifying theme of putting America (and Americans) first?  Yet it has happened.  Not...

For some time now, Ted Gioia has been one of our leading jazz and music critics.  He, along with Gary Giddins, Bob Porter, Marc Myers, Bill Milkowski, Will Friedwald, and several even younger critics and historians like Ricky Riccardi, has gradually taken over the important and tricky work of chronicling America’s music, a mission first...

In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun.  So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.”  For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest...

A computer was the victor on a popular television game show, easily defeating its human competitors; an arms race is under way involving militarized robots that can take the battlefield in the place of inferior humans; in Japan, artificial-intelligence software has outperformed college applicants on a standardized college-entrance examination. Our machines are becoming a part...

Robert Gordon occupies the Stanley G. Harris Chair of Social Sciences at Northwestern University and is the author of a number of works on economic growth, productivity, and unemployment.  His present book has been eagerly awaited, owing to the publication of two “working papers” in 2010 and 2012 by the National Board of Economic Growth—papers...

This is a brilliant and disturbing book.  Its opening sentence is “Europe is doomed.”  If you think that this is simply colorful rhetoric, read on.  Hasta la Vista Europe is not alarmist; it is alarming, making its case in great detail ranging over many issues and countries.  The pseudonymous author represents a number of researchers...

In his latest novel, Derek Turner, author of Sea Changes and Displacement, takes his readers on a seriocomic journey with a latter-day Holy Fool.  Along the way, Turner takes aim at the insanity of political correctness, celebrity culture in the Age of Twitter, and the spiritual wasteland that results from a denial of truth.  A...

Wendell Berry is a Democrat, pacifist, and critic of organized religion.  Add to this the fact that he is a writer whose work has proved compelling to many conservatives, and he becomes a bit mysterious.  At times Berry himself has seemed somewhat bemused by the cultural conservatives who frequently promote his work.  Once we consider...

President Nixon lamented in 1969 to his urban-affairs advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that there was a dearth of poetry in the White House and had the former professor draw up a list of books for him to read.  Nixon soon became enthralled with the 1966 classic biography of Disraeli by Robert Blake.  The book was...

Raphael Israeli examines one of the most difficult political problems of our time: The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  He approaches the subject by presenting and analyzing research on the conflict by earlier Israeli historians (the so-called Old Historians), by more recent Israeli historians (the so-called New Historians who coined the label Old...

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning has received exceptional attention and nearly universal praise.  Prof. Timothy Snyder’s knowledge of the holocaust is almost encyclopedic.  This is his second large book devoted to the horrible history of much of Eastern Europe during World War II.  His main inquiry and subject is what happened to...

Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, by Peter H. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 942 pp., $39.95).  Professor Wilson of Oxford University argues that the history of the Sanctum Imperium Romanum, despite its centrality to the history of Europe and its immense longevity (it lasted for more than a millennium, twice as...

At the end of the first volume of Charles Moore’s lapidary trilogy, we left Mrs. Thatcher standing in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1982, surrounded by the shades of past national leaders, bathed in public approval and growing global respect as the victor of the Falklands War and standard-bearer for a new and dynamic kind of...

In 1996, Barry Alan Shain published his Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought.  It was a book that should have shaken professional conservatism to its foundations.  At the time Patrick J. Buchanan was a standard-bearer for an America bound by a common cultural and religious tradition and was being resisted...

Philippe de Villiers, a French entrepreneur, politician, and author, belongs to what one might call the New French Resistance, a group of contemporary French patriots for whom Paris, not Vichy, symbolizes treason against both the French Republic and the historic French nation.  Descended from an aristocratic family in the Vendée, Villiers is the founder and...

Martin Hacklett is English.  He lives in London.  His father, who used to work on the Thames, has been unemployed for 15 years.  His elder brother has been in and out of prison.  School consisted of the usual encounters with bullies and institutional indifference, and now he’s working as a bicycle courier, weaving his way...

Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer, H.W. Brands, in Reagan: The Life, describes the 40th president as a conservative Franklin Roosevelt.  What Roosevelt was to the “first half of the twentieth century, Reagan was to the second half.” The description occurs with enough frequency to become a recurring theme.  A short chapter at the book’s...

The evidence of the end of the Cold War around 1990 was clearer than evidence of its beginning had been around, say, 1947.  By “Cold War” we mean the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union—not that between the United States and China, which was the outcome of civil war in the latter...

Over the past two decades a great chasm has opened up between the tenured American professoriate specializing in the humanities and social sciences, and the meaningful discussion of its subjects in the public arena.  It is hard to find a recent work by an academic authority on social, historical, and cultural anthropology in general, or...

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! —Sir Walter Scott This work reminds me, on an appropriately more modest scale, of John Lukacs’s book on Philadelphians.  Both hearken back to a time when Americans were a semicivilized people who lived in...

For many, Pope Francis is still a puzzlement, to use the words of the song from that great musical The King and I.  If you are among those puzzled, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. The Great Reformer presents the man, the experiences that shaped him, and his responses to those experiences with...

H.M. Maisky was the Soviet ambassador to Britain from 1932 to 1943.  In June 1943 Stalin ordered him to quit London.  After returning to Moscow, Maisky was posted henceforth to unimportant positions.  In 1953 he was imprisoned; two years later he was released.  He died in 1955. In London (and from time to time in...

In her tenth volume of poetry, Catharine Savage Brosman has given readers a wide array of skillfully written and insightful poems that capture the poet’s keen observations of nature, her journeys from New Mexico to Antarctica, and her sense of humor and wit.  Framed by travel adventures in the United States and a series of...

Reading James Schall is like talking to James Schall.  About a decade ago, when I knew intimately the meaning of US ARMY (“Uncle Sam Ain’t Released Me Yet!”) and orders deployed me for a week downrange to Washington, D.C., and its environs, I contacted Father Schall, and we agreed to meet at the best place...

The present volume, out last fall from the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, is as welcome as its predecessor, Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years, published in 2012.  For the new collection, the editors have selected columns, articles, and essays drawn from across the spectrum of Sobran’s outlets, including the Universal Press Syndicate and Griffin Internet Syndicate,...

On June 1, 1945, Pope Pius XII met for three hours in private audience with his co-conspirator, the German lawyer Josef Müller.  “I had hardly crossed the threshold into his study when the Holy Father approached me, and embraced me,” Müller later wrote.  “The Pope said,” writes the author of this remarkable tale of spiritual...

Having access to personal correspondence and other private papers is every biographer’s dream, a potential difference between a decent biography and a great biography.  In the case of Russell Kirk, the advantage was huge.  Kirk maintained a “massive—in some ways, beyond comprehension—correspondence” over the course of a prolific life in letters.  For example, Bradley Birzer,...