David S. Brown, in 'A Hell of a Storm,' lays blame for the Civil War at the feet of Illinois' Sen. Stephen Douglas who selfishly fought for a major national project benefitting Chicago.
Category: Reviews
Post
Boris the Blowhard
Boris Johnson now profits, by way of premature memoir, off a career built on family connections and an ability to soothe voters with pleasant, but empty phrases. Behold the blowhard.
Post
Books In Brief: October 2025
Short reviews of 'Seven Things You Can’t Say About China,' by Tom Cotton, and 'Antisemitism in America' by Chuck Schumer.
Post
‘The Breakfast Club,’ and Better Teen Movies
Even more than the standard litany of influential teen movies, these forgotten classics touch upon coming-of-age themes that grapple with reality.
Post
What We Are Reading: September 2025
Short reviews of 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Brontë, and 'Voyage Around My Room' by Xavier de Maistre.
Post
Woke Ideology Has Always Benefited Elites, Not Victims
Musa al-Gharbi argues, in 'We Have Never Been Woke,' that super-wealthy leftists display their wokeism to signal status while quietly detesting the consequences of their own policies.
Post
The Feminization of American Law
Ilya Shapiro's 'Lawless' is a splendid reflection on his failure to tweet with the so-called woman's voice—an unacceptable offense in today's feminized legal academy.
Post
The West Turned Upside-Down
In 'How the World Made the West' Josephine Quinn, a progressive Cambridge don, argues that civilizations do not exist—and Western civilization is worst of all.
Post
Books in Brief: September 2025
Short reviews of "Cross Purposes' by Jonathan Rauch, and 'The United States in Crisis' by Edward J. Erler.
Post
The Revived Naked Gun Shoots and Scores
The new 'Naked Gun' calls upon the best aspects of '80s comedy—parody, farce, wordplay, sight gags, and fun non-sequiturs.
Post
What We Are Reading: August 2025
Short reviews of 'Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right' from Bloomsbury Publishing, and 'You, the Jursy' by Mary Borden.
Post
The Modern Right’s Most Original Thinker
A new biography of Chronicles columnist Sam Francis by Joseph Scotchie is filled with quotes and stories that testify to Francis’s underappreciated brilliance and wit. Sam’s memory lives on!
Post
The Truth About the Kent State Shootings
Brian VanDeMark’s ‘Kent State: An American Tragedy’ combines history and advocacy. Unfortunately, the facts get in the way of the story—as is often the case with left-wing myths.
Post
Tapper’s Tombstone for the Legacy Media
'Original Sin' is an exercise in hypocrisy and folly on the part of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. It also raises two important questions: Can the legacy media survive? And, should it?
Post
Books in Brief: August 2025
Short reviews of 'Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,' by Arlie Russell Hochschild, and 'Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: Convert Maker,' by Cheryl C. D. Hughes.
Post
The Depths of Humanity
Netflix’s documentary on the OceanGate disaster shows how an over-inflated ego, if given a little power, can get people killed.
Post
What We Are Reading: June-July 2025
Short reviews of 'The Evolution of Human Sexuality' by Donald Symons, and 'Fool or Physician' by Anthony Daniels.
Post
More Hysteria from Douglas Murray
'On Democracies and Death Cults' serves up neoconservative hysterics that are typical of its author. In Douglas Murray's narrow thinking, you either stand with Israel and democratic values or you belong to a death cult.
Post
From the Finland Station
Sean McMeekin's 'To Overthrow the World' deftly traces the entire history of communism as both idea and governing policy—a feat not seen since Edmund Wilson's 'To the Finland Station.'
Post
War Is With Us Forever
Richard Overy argues in 'Why War?' that war is an inevitable effect of causes deeply embedded within human nature.
Post
Books in Brief: June-July 2025
Short reviews of 'Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America’s Favorite Beer' by Anson Frericks, and 'The Cultured Thug Handbook: A Guide to Radical Right-Wing Thought' by Mike Maxwell.
Post
War Is Hell, but ‘Warfare’ Tells It Like It Is
'Warfare' shows the brutal, on-the-ground reality of the Iraq War, which its author experienced firsthand.
Post
What the Editors Are Reading: May 2025
Short reviews of 'Suicide of a Superpower' by Patrick J. Buchanan, and 'The Genius of Christianity' by Viscount De Chateaubriand
Post
Solzhenitsyn in Exile: A Giant Among Pigmies
"We Have Ceased to See the Purpose" contains Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's most important speeches given during his 20 year exile in the West.
Post
The Sad and Beautiful Death of the Modern Man of the West
Michel Houellebecq, in his final novel, grapples with the struggle to find meaning in the meaningless contemporary West.
Post
How Wealth Co-opted Conservative Politics
David Gibbs’ "Revolt of the Rich" explains how the ultrawealthy seized control of the conservative movement and destroyed the American Dream.
Post
Books in Brief: May 2025
Short reviews of "A Certain Idea of America" by Peggy Noonan and "Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America" by Paola Ramos.
Post
An Elusive Leopard
Netflix's reinvention of Prince Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” turns old Sicily into a cruel hellscape and, thereby, loses the thing that made the original novel great: A nostalgia for the traditional Sicilian society that Italian nationalism crushed.
Post
What We Are Reading: April 2025
Short reviews of 'The American Cinema' by Andrew Sarris, and 'Ressentiment' by Max Scheler.
Post
The Slaves of Steve Jobs’ Revolution
'The Extinction of Experience' indicts the wizards behind the technological curtain for bringing out the worst in human nature.
Post
Citing Scripture for a Progressive Purpose
'The Progressives’ Bible' shows how leftists over the ages—from abolitionists to abortionists—have distorted scripture to build a rhetorical foundation for their political causes and movements.
Post
The Devil in the Murderous Details
'The Devil and Communist China,' outlines the truth about the Chinese regime and deserves great attention not merely from a historical point of view but also from a religious one.
Post
Books in Brief: April 2025
Short reviews of 'The War Against the Past' by Frank Furedi and 'The Total State' by Auron MacIntyre.
Post
Signs of Life
'His Three Daughters' explores the tension between three sisters, who have little in common aside from family, reunited by the pending death of their father.
Post
Captain Anti-America
In 'Captain America: Brave New World' anti-Trump conspiracy theory meets superhero mythology. The leftists finally came for Captain America!
Post
What We Are Reading: March 2025
Short reviews of "A Worthy Company" by M. E. Bradford, and "Intelligence in Danger of Death" by Marcel De Corte.
Post
The Religion of Secular Doomsayers
"American Spirit or Great Awokening?" carefully decodes the hidden religious elements of wokeism’s fascination with climate apocalypticism and trans identity. This little book, however, makes some significant missteps.
Post
The Prime Minister Who Loved the Market Too Much
Former PM Liz Truss's book doubles as a memoir and a stale neo-Thatcherite policy paper. Her politics haven't changed much since the '90s.
Post
The Great America First Conspiracy
Jacob Heilbrunn's "America Last" attempts to undermine the MAGA movement and encourage "the resistance" by discrediting the intellectual history of the America-First right.
Post
Books in Brief: March 2025
Short reviews of 'America First,' by H. W. Brands, and 'The Movement' by Clara Bingham.
Post
A Visual Feast that Fails to Frighten
Though visually dazzling, Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" collapses into caricature and fails to give the audience a good scare.
Post
What We Are Reading: February 2025
Short reviews of 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' by Robert Burton, and 'Working' by Robert A. Caro.
Post
The Last Acceptable Prejudice
'White Rural Rage' alleges hatred, bigotry, and utter depravity of white, rural, Christians with no real evidence. Of course, there is not a forthcoming 'Black Urban Rage.'
Post
Some Honesty From the Left About Guns
In 'Gun Curious,' a liberal academic who is also a gun owner attempts to locate common ground between left and right and create an area for genuine discussion.
Post
Deconstructing the Colonial Guilt Trip
'On Settler Colonialism' questions whether settler-colonial ideology is just the latest product of the demoralization of the Western world that has gone on since 1914 or whether it is an especially vicious and dangerous development.
Post
Books in Brief: February 2025
Short reviews of How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan by Amin Saikal, and Entrances and Exits, by Michael Richards.
Post
Dramatizing Dietrich
Angel Studios has lionized Dietrich Bonhoeffer into a spy and assassin. That's about as historically accurate as making Mahatma Gandhi into Rambo.
Post
What We Are Reading: January 2025
Short reviews of Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow, and The Immigration Mystique by Chilton Williamson.
Post
The Self-Defeating Nature of Jewish Leftism
The book "The New American Anti-Semitism" underlines the dangers of the American Jewish romance with the political left. Yet it still falls into the old trope of calling all Israel's critics anti-Semites.
Post
Searching for Zion
Rachel Cockerell's quest in "Melting Point" to discover the truth about her great-grandfather has produced not just a family history but a history of the broader search for a Jewish homeland.