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Unsmearing Warren G. Harding
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Unsmearing Warren G. Harding

In The Jazz Age President, Ryan Walters sets the record straight about the often-misrepresented Warren G. Harding, who, in his brief time as president, led the country out of a crisis.

Books in Brief: November 2022
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Books in Brief: November 2022

Short reviews of Free: A Child and a History at the End of History, by Lea Ypi, and The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free-Market Era, by Gary Gerstle.

Of Opposite Minds: Maistre and Mill
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Of Opposite Minds: Maistre and Mill

Joseph de Maistre, a brilliant wordsmith, was an elegant defender of the old order, while John Stuart Mill, in his plodding prose, helped to usher in welfare democracy and the modern administrative state.

Race Erased
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Race Erased

Racism, Not Race starts from the assumption that biological races do not exist, rants leftward from there, and finishes by slapping the white-supremacist label on Trump voters.

Rings of Intersectionality
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Rings of Intersectionality

Just as a conquering army defaces the monuments of its defeated foes, America’s woke film industry has seized the opportunity in Rings of Power to have its way with the mythology of Tolkien's Men of the West.

Defense of the American Vision
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Defense of the American Vision

Gordon Wood shows how far we have drifted from the Founding Fathers' vision of a polity that would limit arbitrary power in order that the government might serve the people rather than tyrannize them.

Inhabiting the Mind of the Murderer
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Inhabiting the Mind of the Murderer

Kevin Birmingham reconstructs the aspects of Dostoevsky’s life that fed the stream of creativity that resulted in Crime and Punishment, the greatest psychological profile of a murderer in the annals of fiction.

A Cause, Not a Revolution
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A Cause, Not a Revolution

In The Cause, Pulitzer prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis paints a fascinating picture of the American Revolution through the lenses of those who lived and participated in it.

A Leftist Look at American Unrest
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A Leftist Look at American Unrest

In Wildland, Evan Osnos observes the raging fires of political, environmental, and social problems in America, but his leftist orientation misidentifies how those fires got started.

The Goodness of King George
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The Goodness of King George

In The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts shows George III to be a much better man and king than the caricature presented by propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Marxism Misunderstood
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Marxism Misunderstood

In American Marxism, Mark Levin baldly misunderstands Marxism and tries to link it with woke totalitarianism and anarchism. But the term “Marxist anarchist” is an oxymoron and does nothing to help identify the real enemy.

A Plague on All Our Houses
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A Plague on All Our Houses

Ending Plague, by Francis Ruscetti, Judy Mikovits, and Kent Heckenlively, draws a connection between big pharma’s vaccine industry and a host of modern diseases.

When Mules Go Ballot Trafficking
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When Mules Go Ballot Trafficking

Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules offers an intriguing, if depressing, look at a massively well-organized system of vote fraud apparently executed during the much-disputed 2020 election.

Cromwell’s Climb to Power
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Cromwell’s Climb to Power

From Ronald Hutton’s excellent book, we get not just history but the realization, in this desiccated age, that men such as Cromwell always emerge during great turmoil, rising as if from sown dragon’s teeth.

A Letter from ‘Smart America’
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A Letter from ‘Smart America’

In Last Best Hope, George Packer divides America into four categories of people, about half of whom he despises, and then proceeds to lament their incompatibility as a threat to democracy.

Mapping a Digital Dystopia
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Mapping a Digital Dystopia

In Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford explores the many ways our social structures are disturbingly affected by the rise of technocracy, from the environment to the workplace to corporate and governmental surveillance and data collection.

It’s Time to Break Up Amazon
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It’s Time to Break Up Amazon

Despite Jeff Bezos's libertarian ideology, Amazon has used governmental privilege to grow to a massive scale, and has had a disastrous effect on American life, as Alec MacGillis shows in Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.

Threats? What Threats?
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Threats? What Threats?

In The Stupidity of War, John Mueller takes an absolutist position of noninterventionism in foreign policy. There is much to enjoy in this book, though that joy is tempered when one reads it while war rages in Ukraine.

Books in Brief: May 2022
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Books in Brief: May 2022

Reviews of Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, by Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville, and BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, by Mike Gonzalez

How Republican Supreme Court Justices Gave Us Affirmative Action
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How Republican Supreme Court Justices Gave Us Affirmative Action

A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education   ed. by Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzchild  Encounter Books 336 pp., $28.99   Scholars increasingly treat the issue of race with kid gloves. As the cancel culture accelerates, race—always a sensitive topic—has become nearly taboo. Any serious exploration of the correlation of intelligence and race is...

To Have and to Hold
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To Have and to Hold

Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman  Doubleday 336 pp., $28.95   Aristotle’s observation that philosophy begins in wonder has, for many, conjured up an image of a curious child, bright-eyed and fascinated with the world around him. Similarly, in this book about the philosophical...

What We Are Reading: 3/1/2022
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What We Are Reading: 3/1/2022

This history of World War II should occupy an eminent position in any collection of studies on that conflict; it is a comprehensive treatment of its subject that stands head-and-shoulders above most of the stream of books issued since its publication in 1989. I reread it recently and have consulted it frequently. For many years, John Keegan...