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.
Category: Reviews
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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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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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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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What We Are Reading: December 2023
Short reviews of Broken Record, by Roy Campbell, and The World Crisis, by Winston S. Churchill.
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Scalia Gets the Biography He Deserves
James Rosen’s biography shows Justice Scalia’s greatness in bucking the prevailing liberalism of the Supreme Court.
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Countering the Racial Revolutionaries
Heather Mac Donald documents the absurdities imposed on America by those who put racial equity above all else.
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Two Bad Choices: Assimilate or Die
In resurrecting the melting pot as the antidote to multiculturalism, Heycke neglects a better option: the return to American tradition.
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Books in Brief: December 2023
Short reviews of Character in the American Experience, by Bruce P. Frohnen and Ted V. McAllister, and From Here to Eternity, by Randall B. Smith.
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Alternate Romantic Realities
In Past Lives, circumstances separate two love-struck tweens but a supernatural fate reunites them. The theme disturbs the western sensibility that favors alternatives and individual autonomy.
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What We Are Reading: November 2023
Short reviews of John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, by Luke Mayville, and The Crisis of Modernity, by Augusto Del Noce.
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A Deeper Thing Than Love
A. N. Wilson is extraordinary at discussing the faith of his many friends and acquaintances, and the religious odyssey that he presents is a joyful and hopeful one.
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Prince Harming
Spare is a book of emotional spasms, broken down into bite-sized segments of staccato sentences expressing everything from extravagant griefs to lavish hatreds and saccharine love scenes, with every shade of angst, bathos, and exaltation in between.
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Books in Brief: November 2023
Short reviews of The Disputed Legacy of Sidney Hook, by Gary Bullert, and The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture, by Gabor Maté.
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When the Cure Is the Poison
John Agresto is full of ideas about what needs to be done to fix the broken liberal arts tradition. Unfortunately, his proposed plan won’t work—they're too liberal.
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Muddling the Missile Crisis
The Abyss, a pop history treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, revives unhistorical myths in an effort to chalk the whole thing up to American hysteria, and to portray the bumbling JFK as having masterfully handled the crisis.
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Divided Loyalties
James Cobb admirably assesses the loyalties of C. Vann Woodward, one of the most influential historians of the 20th century, whose best-known books explored the rise of the New South and the emergence of the Jim Crow regime.
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A Data Historian Looks Back in Horror
Peter Turchin's scientific approach to history indicates an upcoming cataclysmic socio-political event that will shake—or possibly destroy—modern society.
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What We Are Reading: October 2023
Short reviews of Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, by Robert Nisbet, and The Power of the Powerless, by Václav Havel.
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Books in Brief: October 2023
Short reviews of The Constitution of Non-State Government, by T. L. Hulsey, and The Past Is a Future Country, by J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles.
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What We Are Reading: September 2023
Short reviews of Middlemarch, by George Eliot, and Shane, by Jack Schaefer.
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Rehabilitating Felix Frankfurter
American law school faculty is often given to unwise and thoughtless hero worship, to which even Felix Frankfurter occasionally succumbed.
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A Flawed Primer on ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’
The book Partisans is a product of contemporary political discourse—made up of cut-and-paste, second- and third-hand source-filled rants—that fails to pass for serious scholarship.
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Invasion of the World Savers
There is still time left to rescue the past, present, and future from William MacAskill’s ideological future savers.
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Books in Brief: September 2023
Short reviews of Tearing Us Apart, by Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, and Dollars for Life, by Mary Ziegler.
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A Spark to Start a Wildfire
Sound of Freedom is a beautifully crafted and passionately humane film about the darkest underbelly of contemporary life: the trafficking and sexual abuse of helpless children.
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Freedom’s Penalties
In Obedience Is Freedom, Jacob Phillips illustrates how too much freedom can often mean unhappiness. Men are not made to endlessly self-create.
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Do Not Spare the Rod, or the Iron Bars
The Myth of Overpunishment is a muscular response to the activists and politicians who cry over the supposedly too-high incarceration rate of the American justice system.
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The Modern Myth of a Lockean Founding
America’s Philosopher posits that Americans in the 20th century weaponized John Locke for their own ideological ends and read Locke into the American founding. This has given Locke an outsized importance as a means to an ideological end.
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The Imperial Imperative
In the Shadow of the Gods chronicles the charismatic and influential movers of history, known as emperors.
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What We Are Reading: August 2023
Immigration proponents make obvious contradictory claims. They repeat endlessly that recent immigrants are integrating just as fully as earlier immigrants did. Yet they also want to turn the idea that “America is a melting pot” into a prohibited microaggression. If it really is happening, why is it a moral crime to mention it? They lose...
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Books in Brief: August 2023
Short reviews of Danger Close! A Vietnam Memoir, by Phil Gioia, and Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley.
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Longing for the Sacred
Though his portrayal of the Catholic saint is superficial at best, Padre Pio director Abel Ferrara's at least accomplish something, accidentally, by leading the film's star onto a redemptive path.
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To Be Or Not to Be Western Civilization
Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization, by R.V. Young, is an invaluable defense of Shakespeare against modern anti-Western critics.
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What We Are Reading: June-July 2023
Short reviews of Noble Savages, by Napoleon Chagnon, and The Natural Family Where It Belongs, by Allan C. Carlson.
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Books in Brief: June-July 2023
Short reviews of His Name Is George Floyd, by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, and Aftershock, by George H. Wolfe.
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Empire’s Bloody End
In A Continent Erupts Ronald Spector analyzes the complex conflicts of East and Southeast Asia in the 10 years after the end of World War II.
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McCarthy’s Missing Man
The Passenger reflects Cormac McCarthy's longtime internal debate over the meaning, if any, and purpose, if any, of human existence.
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Books in Brief: May 2023
Short reviews of Dollars for Life, by Mary Ziegler, and The Encyclopedia of Confederate Generals, by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
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World War II, Served Slightly Woke
In Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, Richard Overy gives a comprehensive analysis of World War II, despite a tiresome woke influence on the topic of imperialism.
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What We Are Reading: May 2023
Short reviews of Pevsner's Architectural Glossary, by Nikolaus Pevsner, and Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, by Thomas Jefferson Hogg.
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A Colonial History of African-Americans
In African Founders, David Hackett Fischer asserts that the traditions of liberty, equality, and the rule of law often transcended the evils of slavery in early America and were embraced, with impressive results, by masters and slaves alike.
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Advanced Ideological Disease in Academe
It's Not Free Speech is a poorly argued attempt to defend the so-called expertise of woke academics.
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The End of Liberalism Nears
In his latest book, Francis Fukuyama sees liberalism under threat from extremists on both the populist right and the identitarian left.
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What We Are Reading: April 2023
Short reviews of Over Here: The First World War and American Society, by David Kennedy, and The Voyage of the Catalpa, by Peter Stevens.
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Books in Brief: April 2023
Short reviews of Interventions 2020, by Michel Houellebecq, and The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great Power Rivalry Today, by Hal Brands.
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The Cause of Us All
Mark Winchell explores the myth of Abraham Lincoln's "deification" in American culture, among other Southern themes.
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Beating a Dead Imperial Horse
In Legacy of Violence, Caroline Elkins projects her skewed view of 1950s Kenya onto the entire history of the British Empire.
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Soldiers of Burden
Outsourcing Duty tackles the issues that arise in countries where a large majority of citizens avoid military service and isolate themselves from the risks and moral responsibilities that soldiers face.