Category: Reviews

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,...

A distinguished and liberal economic historian, Prof. Michael Hudson has laid bare the secret of the present American dilemma—why we suffer a declining and artificial economy and a widening chasm between the rich and the rest.  The interest-collecting rich absorb ever more of the national income.  “Instead of creating a mutually beneficial symbiosis with the...

This book was first published in England as The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century.  Neither title describes the book very accurately.  It is really an extended meditation on Browne’s life and interests as they strike a 21st-century science writer who likes to ride a bicycle and who, like Browne, lives in...

The elegantly titled Iron Wall is a perfect example of how a necessary book on an important topic can be rendered inadequate by the author’s all-consuming bias.  In the Preface to this immense volume, Avi Shlaim, a retired professor at Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy, describes his well-connected family as Iraqi “Arab”...

The varied and complex relations between religion and power can be understood only by means of extensive comparisons, between nations and across time.  Who better to demonstrate this than Prof. David Martin, the doyen of the comparative sociology of religion? Martin’s first achievement is to refute “the general theory of secularisation,” which has enjoyed so...

The 21st century has not so far been a happy time for American conservatives.  It began with an appalling terrorist attack whose key perpetrators had taken advantage of our government’s insouciance toward mass immigration from the Third World.  Instead of reversing the trend toward demographic transformation, the authorities doubled down on it: We now accept...

“Conservatives engage in rebellions, not revolutions.”  How true, and what a way to begin a book. The Conservative Rebellion is part memoir, part intellectual and political history by a scholar who came of age in the revolutionary 1960’s, when fashionable people viewed rebels as Parliament viewed the Boston Minutemen.  (King George III, however, considered George...

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) is considered to be among the most important American poets of the 20th century.  She was a U.S. Poet Laureate and won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and the Neustadt International Prize.  Her collection Questions of Travel (1965) may be the best known.  Perhaps her literary reputation outpaces her true...

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was the most substantial intellectual to reach high political office in the United States since Woodrow Wilson.  Thus his life, writings, policy deliberations, and political efforts, and the effects of these, deserve the most careful and respectful attention.  If the apocalyptic era of European history began with the outbreak of World...

Until the late 1950’s and early 60’s, the deal for government employees was that they were paid less than similar private-sector workers but got excellent benefits, especially strong pensions and almost absolute job security.  And although some government workers belonged to associations, they did not have collective-bargaining rights. The deal was a fairly good one. ...

On a flank of the White Mountains not far from the Maine state line lies a small New Hampshire town called Albany, population 735.  Every seven years, town officials arrange for a surveyor to walk the boundaries of the town, clearing brush, cleaning up markers, and checking to see whether a neighboring, larger town might...

Art and literature are powerful mediums to convey timeless truths.  In the Introduction to Catholic Literary Giants, Joseph Pearce declares the power of art to evangelize, a defense of the Catholic Faith he terms the “apologetics of beauty.”  He cites Dante, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Tolkien, and Waugh as a Catholic’s literary “weapons” to wield against the...

Sir Max Beerbohm, 1872–1956, was a famous caricaturist with a style very much his own.  He was a successful author, too, though not a prolific one: a book of stories (Seven Men), a set of parodies (A Christmas Garland), and one fantasy novel (Zuleika Dobson) make up the sum of his output for most people. ...

It is a commonplace among American conservatives that, at some point in the past, the way Americans understood their constitutional and cultural tradition diverged from the reality of the constitutional order established in 1787.  For the Southern Agrarians and their intellectual descendants, the great change occurred with the Civil War, which elevated “union” over the...

“Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.”  Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss is sometimes more deadly than the curse. ...

This is a book about life in a society from which higher goods have been expelled, leaving no place for love, wonder, or beauty.  The “compulsion” of the title is that which guides people in such a setting.  In default of anything better, people fall under the dominion of itches, obsessions, and impositions, and mistake...

A minority on the left is possibly willing to admit that a few “good Southerners” during the War Between the States opposed slavery, secession, and the Confederacy.  Probably a much smaller minority would concede that a considerable number of Northerners opposed the war either to preserve the Union or to free the slaves.  That, in...

After publishing highly acclaimed biographies of Zola and Flaubert, the New York City-based Frederick Brown established himself as an expert on French cultural and intellectual life with his magnificent book For the Soul of France, a saga of the struggle between the militant secularists and the royalist reactionaries between the fall of Napoleon III and...

In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published The Imperial Presidency.  He argued that the stretching of presidential power by Democrats Roosevelt and Truman had been necessary and benevolent, but that such behavior by Nixon was a dark threat to the commonwealth.  Schlesinger’s childishly partisan and superficial tirade was soon forgotten.  Time has moved on, and...

Washington and Brussels were surprised by the Kremlin’s strong reaction to the ousting of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February of last year.  They shouldn’t have been.  Yanukovych was forced out of office after he backed away from signing a Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, an agreement Moscow viewed as a threat to its economic...

John Derbyshire is among the most prominent and prolific of writers of the paleo or nationalist right.  I think of him as a Tory, and his writing as Swiftian.  Some readers of this magazine are likely regular readers of his online essays, a selection of which, all culled from the year 2013, have been reprinted...

Ann Coulter credits Peter Brimelow’s famous essay published in National Review in 1992 with delivering the blinding revelation that opened her eyes to the social and political crisis precipitated by the Establishment’s immigration policies since 1965.  Having been rudely knocked off her horse, Miss Coulter has been hurling thunderbolts of her own all the way...

My first exposure to Alexander Dugin came via YouTube, when I discovered Vladimir Pozner’s 2014 interview with the controversial theorist.  Marred somewhat by cultural relativism, Dugin’s critique of Anglo-American empire nonetheless contained more depth than a year’s supply of the Washington Post.  Civilization cannot exist without a willingness to use lethal force on its behalf,...

I guess the misguided call it whining—the apparent conservative fixation on modern awfulness; on the disappearance of morals, manners, handwritten notes, and neckties, and the concomitant nonstop appearance of . . . shall we just leave it at H. Rodham Clinton?  Thanks, I’ll do that. The misguided require guidance into a loftier understanding of the...

One of the things that James VI of Scotland liked about becoming James I of England—apart from the money—was that as head of the Church of England he would never be bossed about by a Scotch Calvinist minister again.  Moreover, unlike his predecessor Elizabeth I, who never cared much for that aspect of her job,...

Thirty years ago Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was hardly visible on the American intellectual horizon, and the rare mention of his name in scholarly publications was usually dismissive.  After all, Schmitt was a Nazi, a Catholic extremist, and an inveterate enemy of the liberal order.  Today, Schmitt’s major works are available in English translation, and a...

I first encountered the poetry of B.H. Fairchild when I chose to review Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2003).  Despite its odd, even off-putting title, which seems to extrude tendrils of the New Age, the book was—is—one of the best original collections of contemporary poetry I’ve read.  It proceeded to win the...

By any reasonable measure, the policies carried out by the U.S. government since 1990 toward the Muslim countries of the Middle East (democracy promotion, regime change, political stabilization, “peace process,” antiterrorism) have failed disastrously.  Not only is nothing better over there, but everything is worse over here, the home of the not-so-brave and ever-less-free.  Every...

Michel Houellebecq is one of France’s best regarded novelists, nonfiction writers, and essayists.  His latest novel, Soumission (Submission), appearing some months after the publication of Éric Zemmour’s Le suicide français, in the same month as the murders at Charlie Hebdo, and following a series of killings of Jews by Muslims in several French cities and...

Blessed is the soul who, early in life, is gifted with a passionate interest in some art, craft, sport, pastime, or field of knowledge.  The object of passion might be well-nigh anything at all, so long of course as it is not vicious: stamp collecting or field hockey, cabinetry or the Civil War, boxing or...

Everybody knows that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key as he watched the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812.  But in 1861 Francis Key Howard wrote about his grandfather, “The flag which he then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over...

Russian political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov once wrote that state power, or vlast, and not law “holds a sacred status in Russia.”  Russians, according to Pastukhov, experience state power as a “mystical entity,” a “life giving substance,” a “deity” in its own right, from whom, in times of trouble, the narod (the people) expects answers. Anna...

When a former colleague sent me a snippet from The New Yorker of September 22, 2014—a piece called “As Big As the Ritz,” by Adam Gopnik—the attention therein given to two recent books on F. Scott Fitzgerald caught my eye, not only because I had already acquired one of them, but because I was repelled...

In general I am not a fan of conspiracy theories.  A good historian learns that, in regard to controversial events, the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be accurate.  I long ago took to heart Napoleon’s maxim that you should not blame on hidden machinations what can be more readily explained by incompetence....

One of the few parts of the U.S. Constitution that is still followed by the government concerns the granting of copyrights and patents.  Article I, Section 8, reads, “Congress shall have the power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the...