Reading Ann Coulter’s newest polemical masterpiece brings to mind one of her previous ones. I don’t mean her sparkling In Trump We Trust, published just before the 2016 election (and reviewed in this magazine), in which she predicted that the unthinkable would happen. Rather I refer to her 2011 book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob...
God, War, and Providence approaches the story of Roger Williams by exploring the relationship between Puritan Massachusetts and Williams’s Rhode Island, and the relations both colonies had with the Indian tribes inhabiting these regions. Plymouth Plantation was founded in 1620 by English Separatists. The plantation system had first been employed in Ireland to subjugate the...
Last fall, when they stopped in New York on their way to vacation in Europe, Chronicles editor Chilton Williamson and his wife invited Taki and me to dinner. Before the wine started flowing and Taki’s raconteurial skills became the primary entertainment, Chilton mentioned his desire for more reviews of books of economic history in the...
David Cannadine launches Victorious Century by quoting Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of...
Two questions immediately suggest themselves regarding this work: Who was (or is) Pandora (and her box), and do we really need yet another book on World War I, detailing its causes, alliances, generals, battles—replete with maps, photos, charts and so forth? Yes, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the war’s end (November 11, at 11:00...
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” —Yogi Berra I call 2016 the Chronicles Election. The issues discussed in this magazine, often a lonely voice in the wilderness, for more than 30 years finally caught up with the national political discourse and got a president elected. They are bum trade deals, an eroding industrial...
Some of the best-loved characters in English literature are observed only dimly through the eyes of an unreliable first-person narrator; like fish seen through the glass of a tank, they swim toward us, momentarily dazzling in their colors, before receding again into the murk. Such is surely the case with P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal creation Reginald...
In 1912, at dusk walking home, Henry Adams spotted something he thought to be a hippopotamus in the nation’s capital. As he drew nearer he saw it was President Taft. He gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble to pieces than ever . . . but what struck me most was the...
It’s easy in this business to read too much journalism at the expense of books. Every morning I go through the New York Times (faster and more selectively with each week that passes), the (London) Daily Telegraph, and Le Figaro (it has some strong conservative writers, like Luc Ferry, and interesting essays and well-done interviews...
In 1935, as president of France, Pierre Laval banned “weapons of war” and decreed that all firearms should be registered with the government. In 1945 he was tried and found guilty of treason for his collaboration with the German occupation. Between those two years, Hitler built his strong war machine, and in 1940 he invaded...
If ever there was a democratic election in a giant modern nation-state, it was Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2016. And I’ve closely watched every presidential election since I was nine in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson lied his way to a landslide against Barry Goldwater. Trump gathered the remnants of Nixon’s Silent Majority and the...
I met Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn in May of last year. With a few others, we shared breakfast before the opening session of the second Budapest Demographic Forum. He was every bit the “footballer” I had been told to expect. Of modest stature, he moved—even at age 54—with an assured athleticism. This event was...
Is there a distinctly British brand of heroism? That is the implicit question running through Christopher Sandford’s Zeebrugge, a gripping new history of the British naval raid in April 1918 on the German-held Belgian port of that name. The sheer audacity of the operation and its attendant tales of sacrifice and derring-do resulted in a...
Let’s say that a state passed a statute proscribing teachers from teaching reading in a language other than English until the student had passed the eighth grade. Violation of the statute was a misdemeanor. The state’s rationale was to assure that immigrant children learned English and assimilated. In fact, the state declared that teaching immigrant...
When the review copy of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, by Alistair Horne, hit my desk at National Review in 1977, I found a reviewer immediately and waited for a second copy to follow from the publisher (as is so often the case in the publishing business). When it failed to arrive, I...
Women in Combat: Unnatural, Foolish, Immoral, by Mark C. Atkins (Cottage Grove, TN: Gildersleeve Publications; 212 pp., $10.99). Mark Atkins describes himself as a “failed Marine” who has never been in combat and who writes “with the same authority as that little boy who cried, “The Emperor has no clothes!” He is also a businessman...
Ross Douthat, who converted to Catholicism as a teenager, performed a great service to the Church when he wrote To Change the Church, his assessment of Pope Francis’s pontificate thus far. Despite his many criticisms of Francis, Douthat avoids anger and bitterness, giving the Pope the benefit of every doubt and freely acknowledging that the...
History can be refracted through countless prisms—cultural, economic, environmental, ideological, moral, national, racial, religious—but one has been oddly unexplored, despite being not just obvious but ubiquitous. That prism is color, an element that suffuses every instinct and thought, hues our whole universe. Since hominids evolved opsin genes, we have been able to distinguish between colors...
“All the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.” —Acts 17:21 To some, Jordan Peterson is a breath of fresh air. To others, a guru. Many find him and his ideas to be dangerous. Still others see him as a...
Field of Blood is one of the best new novels I have read in many a year, a superbly written book by a Russian scholar and analyst who is also a careful artist, a stylist, and a poet in prose and in form who has accomplished what few essayists and nonfiction authors ever succeed at:...
Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life, by Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin (Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge; 368 pp., $35.00). Theodore Roosevelt always considered himself a man of letters, and indeed he was one. He began reading widely and writing at an early age, and a day never seems to have passed when he did not read and...
I discovered only by accident a week ago a little book called Liberalism, by the English philosopher John Gray, published originally in 1986 and in its second edition in 1995. For many reasons, I wish I’d known of it earlier, as I’m finding it useful in my continuing pursuit of liberalism—and of the nastier and...
Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present, and Future of the United States, by Victor Bulmer-Thomas (New Haven: Yale University Press; 480 pp., $32.50). This excellent and timely book is of great interest as informed speculation on the future of the United States; at a secondary level, it is a meditation on empire in history. Bulmer-Thomas,...
Next year marks the 900th anniversary of Roger of Salerno’s defeat at Ager Sanguinis, the Field of Blood. The battle raged near Sarmada, west of Aleppo, on June 28, 1119. Roger, regent of Antioch (for the child Bohemond II), led his smaller force against the larger Turkic army of Ilghazi, the Artuqid ruler of Aleppo. ...
Life in America these days has become a vast numbers racket. That is, most Americans are, cannily or not, ensnared in the numbers game called metrics, or what Jerry Muller in his latest book terms the “metrics fixation.” This fixation is founded on the assumption that “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” ...
Today, all books by liberals really are about President Trump. Such is Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, by MSNBC far-left fake-news host Lawrence O’Donnell. This book’s proxy is Richard Nixon and his 1968 victory for president against Aunt Blabby, a.k.a. Hubert Horatio Humphrey. For Nixon, Humphrey, South Vietnam,...
With the publication of volumes V and VI, the Princeton edition of W.H. Auden’s collected prose is complete in almost 5,000 pages, covering over 45 years of a writing life. These final volumes cover the last ten years of Auden’s life, from 1963 to 1973. They are handsomely presented, and the helpful introductions and notes...
“Liberalism has failed,” writes University of Notre Dame political-science professor Patrick Deneen in his new book with a related title. “Nearly every one of the promises . . . made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered,” he adds. Liberalism has “generated pathologies” that have corrupted the nation’s economy and culture and...
The Legitimacy of the Human, by Rémi Brague, translated and with an Introduction by Paul Seaton (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press; 176 pp., $26.00). Rémi Brague, the French Catholic historian and political philosopher, made his wider reputation in the early 1990’s with his book Europe, la voie romaine (in English translation, Eccentric Culture: A...
I have been reading through, here and there at odd moments as I find the time, the Fall/Winter number of The Chesterton Review, generously sent me by Fr. Ian Boyd, C.S.B., the journal’s editor, and designated its Special Journalism Issue. Chesterton always insisted that he was no more, and no less, than a “jolly journalist,”...
When the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s preliminary injunction against President Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from certain countries, it cited Trump’s statements about Islam as its rationale. American Muslims challenging the ban had alleged injury of two types: First, the Muslim plaintiffs felt marginalized by the President’s characterizations; second, they...
This is no conspiracy theory. There is no secret group that meets secretly to make secret plans to run the global economy. All is done in the open. The global money elite is well known—the G7 leaders, the central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, major hedge-fund managers, corporate CEOs,...
Disconnected is not an amusing book. The subtitle’s “digitally distracted” doesn’t hint at its grim findings. This short text—a long one might be too dispiriting—is nevertheless lengthy enough to expose the digital revolution as an outright calamity, though the author generally eschews the apocalyptic tone. Of course, there is the familiar boast that children now...
Niall Ferguson is a distinguished historian of Scottish origin who specializes in big arguments, and contrarian claims. His books are always provocative, frequently infuriating, and often (if not always) correct in their analyses. Unlike most academic historians, he genuinely understands issues of business and finance, both in the contemporary world and in the historic past,...
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was bred in the bone for his role on the stage of 20th-century American history. His father, the historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger, was already a rising academic star when Arthur Jr. was born in 1917 in Iowa City, while, on his mother’s side, the prominent 19th-century historian, George Bancroft, was said to...
Gordon Wood, regarded as the foremost historian of the American Revolution, has written a very fine account of the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Though strained at times, their friendship extended through the turbulence of the War for Independence and through the adoption of the Constitution, went off the rails with the development...
“Drain the swamp!” Donald Trump declared in every campaign speech of 2016. He meant, of course, the Swamp of Washington, D.C., home of the labyrinthine network of centralized bureaucracies that control our lives. It’s also called the Deep State and the Permanent Bureaucracy. Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as well as the two Republican...
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Linda Greenhouse, retired Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, is a brilliantly qualified journalist: hard-working, creative, dedicated to the needs of her profession as she understands them. Which seems really to be the problem here; a problem large and grave, requiring critical analysis. Greenhouse’s very personal sense...
Anthony Powell’s million-word, 12-volume novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is one of the great achievements of postwar English literature, attracting near-universal praise for its subtle and textured evocation of England between World War I and the 1960’s. Powell’s narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, looks on quizzically as a representative cavalcade of 20th-century characters...
When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was first passed, “help wanted: men” and “help wanted: women” ads were common in newspapers. Private employers could hire and fire for discriminatory reasons. Title VII made discriminatory ads and the hiring practices they represent illegal. In their new book, Unequal, two law professors, Sandra...
“I’m a pastor, not a scholar,” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia since 2011, said when I interviewed him earlier last year for Catholic World Report about his new book. “A bishop’s job is helping people get to heaven, not to Washington.” In fact, since the death of Francis Cardinal George...
Conservatives more than anyone else view with a gimlet eye the rise of the Internet and the gigantic tech companies that are taking over ever larger parts of our lives. Even the place where most of these companies dwell, Silicon Valley, is a bastardization of its real name, Santa Clara, or St. Claire of Assisi,...
Stage play premiered June 9, 2017, the Sheen Center, New York City • Producer: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P., Blackfriars Repertory Theatre • Director: Peter Dobbins, Storm Theatre Company • Assistant Director: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P. • Choreographer: Jennifer Delac • Cast: Nicholas Carrière (Sassoon), Sarah Naughton (Death), Michael Raver (Owen) Joseph Pearce has...
Recently, we marked the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, an event sparked by the revolutionary fire in the minds of men that has burned for as long as there have been men on the earth. In the modern era, revolution ignited in France in the 18th century. It caught fire again in 1848,...
In her Preface to this collection, Catharine Savage Brosman tells the reader that these essays are of three kinds: recollections of her own life and family, commentaries on literature, and examinations of the current state of American culture. Taken together, her essays, Brosman says, are “an exercise in seeing the world, even feeling it, and...
The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis, by James E. Lewis, Jr. (Princeton University Press; 728 pp., $35.00). This well-written and readable book considers the political and social context of the so-called Burr Conspiracy (1805-06), in which Jefferson’s former Vice President Aaron Burr was rumored to have plotted to enlist conspirators...
Gary Sheffield is an old hand at writing the history of World War I. In addition to being a professor of war studies at the University of Wolverhampton, he was co-editor of Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters, 1914-18. It is obvious that he wishes to set not just the United Kingdom but the whole...
A century ago, the American Midwest was in the ascendant, widely acknowledged as the nation’s vital Heartland, a place characterized by a morally strong and independent populace, a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth in land (the classic 160 acre family farm), and true democratic values. The print media of the day celebrated its distinctive farm...
Where does life come from, and why is it what it is? These are great mysteries. Even so, Darwinian theorists tell us it is nothing but a mechanical process that in principle is entirely explicable by reference to biochemistry, and thus to well-known properties of matter. The key, they say, is random variation and natural...
When Donald Trump defeated Ted Cruz in the 2016 Indiana presidential primary, the race for the Republican Party nomination was over. The prize was Trump’s. The next day, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he was not yet ready to endorse the standard-bearer. George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush quickly followed suit,...