Short reviews of Who Are We?, by Samuel P. Huntington, and Lost Horizon, by James Hilton.
Category: Reviews
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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.
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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.