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.
Category: Reviews
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Top Men at Work
Top Gun-Maverick is predictable and predictably Tom Cruise, but Our Man in Havana is just the opposite: what starts as espionage satire turns sharply and creatively to spy thriller.
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Books in Brief: August 2022
Short reviews of The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, by Marc Morris, and Wrath: America Engraged, by Peter Wood.
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The Last Temptation of The King
Baz Lurhmann's new film about Elvis Presley asks us to adulate The King, but in reality, he was given too much, too soon.
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What We Are Reading: August 2022
Short reviews of Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, by Mark Regnerus, and Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What We Are Reading: July 2022
Short reviews of Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, and Dinner at Antoine's, by Francis Parkinson Keyes.
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Divorce-Court Demolition
In The Respondent, Hollywood actor Greg Ellis reveals the tyrannical horrors of the family court system, designed especially to emasculate men.
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The Shadow of Sodom
Allyn Walker's audacious Long Dark Shadow is a thinly veiled attempt to normalize pedophilia.
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Books in Brief: July 2022
Short reviews of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America, by Charles Murray, and Pessoa: A Biography, by Richard Zenith.
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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.
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What We Are Reading: June 2022
Short reviews of The Double Life of Paul de Man, by Evelyn Barish, and The Road to Hell, by Paul Liberatore.
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Books in Brief: June 2022
Brief reviews of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, by Edward Slingerland, and Index, A History of the, by Dennis Duncan.
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A History of American Identities
In After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman explores three historical attempts at answering the question, “What does it mean to be an American?”
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Justice Harlan’s Color-Blind Dissent
Supreme Court Justice John Harlan helped to shape the “color-blind” legal approach toward race in America, and his views were likely shaped by a man likely to have been his mixed-race half-brother.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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What We Are Reading: May 2022
Reviews of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard and Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society by Paul Hollander.
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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...
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Books in Brief: 3/1/2022
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, by Cal Flyn (Viking; 384 pp., $27.00). In our era of ecological angst, many are desperately seeking strategies to mitigate human damage, but Scottish writer Cal Flyn suggests a holistic new way—one that is simultaneously haunted and hopeful—of seeing these problems. She writes often in sorrow, sometimes in righteous...
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Labor Betrayed by the Progressive Left
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant Harvard University Press 368 pp., $35.00 Once upon a time, there were academic historians on whom the public could rely for help in accurately understanding the world in which we live. Scholars such as Samuel Eliot...
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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...
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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...
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Books in Brief: February 2022
Christianity and Social Justice, by Jon Harris (Reformation Zion Publishing; 160 pp., $14.99). In this slim discussion of social justice and its relationship, or non-relationship, to Christianity, Jon Harris, a Protestant theologian and Baptist minister, addresses the topic long after he observed the “incursion made by the social justice movement” into the Baptist seminary where he...
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Revisiting Suicide of the West
The philosopher and commentator James Burnham (1905-1987) was one of National Review’s founders and senior editors. Having broken with Trotskyism, he became one of those thinkers in the tradition of Edmund Burke and James Fitzjames Stephen, who, if not enthusiastic about modern democracy, were classic defenders of free institutions. He attained fame for his 1941...
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‘Woke’ Evolution
A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin’s Descent of Man Got Right and Wrong about Human Evolution Ed. Jeremy DeSilva Princeton Universtiy Press 288 pp., $27.95 The complex debate about the place of Darwinian theory in discussions about humankind’s nature has been further complicated by an academic left that has taken up trashing Darwin—who is, after...
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Doubting Thomas
Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell by Jason L. Riley Basic Books 304 pp., $30 It is hardly surprising that an economist and historian of ideas who spent a long career arguing against the conventional wisdom of politicians and policy wonks would have a biography about him titled Maverick. It is much more surprising...
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What We Are Reading: February 2022
What makes a great novelist? Genius—the ability to see connections hidden from most of us—obviously helps, but if great novels are great commentaries on the human condition, then living in a rich, stimulating, and challenging environment may also be essential. A.N. Wilson’s brilliantly unorthodox literary biography of Iris Murdoch—perhaps the greatest novelist writing in...
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Bibliotheca of the Bizarre
The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities From History by Edward Brooke-Hitching Chronicle Books 256 pp., $29.95 Books are the “emblem of civilization,” Edward Brooke-Hitching writes in a new book that explores the strange history of the medium. The earliest books were used to establish and uphold administrative, legal, and taxation...
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Driving Miss Racial Activist
At first blush, the 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy seems innocuous. Its plot centers around the relationship of an aging Jewish matron, Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), and her black chauffeur Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman). Yet a recent rewatch caused me to notice irksome elements of the plot I missed the first time around. This has...
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Reader Letters: Diversity as a Weakness | Professor Janowski replies: | The Feminized Force | Tyrannical Tariffs
Professor Zbigniew Janowski, in his essay “Equality’s Third Wave,” (January 2022 Chronicles) has hit the nail on the head. Equality isn’t good enough, but equity and diversity should prevail. Quality and merit are gone; second-rate is now good enough. We have watered down our core values to the lowest common denominator! —Lynn Paskow Savits Aventura,...