Short reviews of His Name Is George Floyd, by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, and Aftershock, by George H. Wolfe.
Category: Reviews
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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.
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Zero Plus Ten
Harald Jähner's Aftermath offers a panoramic view of the process of recovery for Germans in all occupation zones during the first 10 years after World War II.
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Stan Evans: Unsung Hero of the Right
Despite his significant contributions to the post-WWII right in America, M. Stanton Evans is not as well-known as his many accomplishments warrant. Steven Hayward's new biography sets the record straight.
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What We Are Reading: March 2023
Brief reviews of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and The Death of Punishment, by Robert Blecker.
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Books in Brief: March 2023
Brief reviews of Science in an Age of Unreason, by John Staddon, and Criminal (In)Justice, by Rafael Mangual.
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The Boomers’ Bogus View of World War II
Using history, memoir, and popular culture as sources, Elizabeth Samet highlights the contrast between the concrete realities of World War II and its subsequent transfiguration in American memory since the 1990s.
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Four Women Against the Oxford Dons
In the 1930s and '40s, four female students at Oxford challenged the dons with an intellectually vigorous return to Aristotle and classical and medieval approaches to a philosophy of human action.
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What We Are Reading: February 2023
Short reviews of Commentaries on the Gallic War, by Julius Caesar, and What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George.
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The Mathematics Behind the Man
Ananyo Bhattacharya’s biography of the genius mathematician John von Neumann is rich in details about the man's work but lacking in characterizations of the man himself.
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Books in Brief: February 2023
Brief reviews of Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations, by Benedict Beckeld, and The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872, by Daniel J. Burge.
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The Age of Nixon
Russell Kirk, a venerated conservative man of letters, weighs in on Nixon’s response to the media-incited campaign against him, from the July 1990 issue of Chronicles.
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Clap & Trap
John Lukacs dissects the self-important claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, world history would culminate in the inevitable acceptance of the American “liberal democratic” model worldwide.
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The Costs of Culture
M. E. Bradford illuminates the problem of a government agency, the NEH, that claims to promote “culture” but has instead become a source of handouts to well-connected educational institutions.
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Ireland’s Arc to a Post-Christian Nation
Crawford Gribben has produced a fascinating history of Christian Ireland from its promising beginnings, in the age following the fall of the Roman Empire, to its dramatic decline in recent decades.
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What We Are Reading: December 2022
Short reviews of Feminism & Freedom, by Michael Levin, and the Sword of Honor trilogy, by Evelyn Waugh.
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Books in Brief: December 2022
Short reviews of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti, and The Black Boom, by Jason Riley.
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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.
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The Wehrmacht in Their Own Words
By allowing the German soldiers to speak, historian David Harrisville helps us to see World War II through their eyes, almost sympathetically. Many were devoted Christians who saw the war as a struggle against "godless" and "inhumane" Soviets.
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What We Are Reading: November 2022
Short reviews of The Fox in the Attic, by Richard Hughes, and Boke Named the Gouernour, by Sir Thomas Elyot.
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Reading Your Way Around the World
In Around the World in 80 Books, David Damrosch makes a literary journey that loosely follows Jules Verne's classic geographical adventure of similar title.
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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.
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Of Demons and Ghosts
The 2022 film Prey is a predictable woke prequel to the 1987 film Predator. A better choice for adventure is the 1935 classic, The Ghost Goes West, starring Robert Donat.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What We Are Reading: October 2022
Short reviews of Days of Rage, by Bryan Burrough, and All the World's Mornings, by Pascal Quignard.
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Books in Brief: October 2022
Short reviews of Major Works, Vol. I, by Joseph de Maistre, and The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, by Mark Bauerlein.
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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.
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The Progressive Worldview Destroys Cities
Michael Shellenberger gives an insightful, heartbreaking account of how profoundly the worst radical ideas have corrupted cities like San Francisco, from the highest levels on down.
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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.
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Greatness of Heart in Manzoni’s “The Betrothed”
Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed is an exemplar of artistic accomplishment, full of true heroism and the struggle between good and evil in singular souls, as well as a shrewd and profoundly political vision.
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What We Are Reading: September 2022
In La Guerre D'Espagne, historian Stanley Payne delivers an even-handed collection of scholarly essays on the Spanish Civil War.
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Books in Brief 2: September 2022
Short reviews of A Brief History of Equality, by Thomas Piketty, and American Exceptionalism, by Ian Tyrrell.
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Books in Brief: September 2022
Short reviews of Whatever Happened to Tradition, by Tim Stanley, and The Case for Patriarchy, by Timothy J. Gordon.
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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.
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Hemingway’s Men at War: Anthology of an Obsession
Despite structural flaws, Men at War, edited by Ernest Hemingway, offers fascinating insights into Hemingway's views on fiction-writing, war reporting, and war itself.
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Sleepwalking in the Nanny State
In Purchasing Submission, legal expert Philip Hamburger documents the power of the federal government to control and coerce by the granting and withholding of federal funds.