Category: Reviews

As a second-year West Point cadet in March 1969, I was returning to my room after chemistry class midafternoon on a Friday. As I stepped inside Pershing Barracks, I saw a number of cadets huddled around a note posted on the stairway railing. In neat penmanship were the words: “General Eisenhower died this morning.” Neither...

For a pacific, commercial republic protected by two giant oceans and two peaceful neighbors with small militaries, America sure has fought a lot of wars.  Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War details eight American leaders beginning in 1807 who took us to war and just one, Jefferson, who didn’t. The text wraps up after the Vietnam...

This handsome hardbound volume, an authoritative study in art history that can pass as a coffee-table book, is billed by its publisher as “the first-ever history of the representation of dreams in Western painting.” The author, Daniel Bergez, is himself a painter, and also a scholar, critic, and professor at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris....

The first English translation of Ernst Jünger’s journals from the Second World War is a cause for celebration. The journals were like treasures stashed away in an old castle, behind a door that could be unlocked only if one learned to read German. It’s open now, and what’s inside are literary gems on every page....

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been criticized since its founding in 1995. Leftists claim that free trade places the Third World at a disadvantage, while President Donald Trump and paleo conservatives argue that some WTO policies threaten U.S. sovereignty. But what is the origin of the WTO and the neoliberal economic theory that underlies...

Stephen Bodio is a memoirist, journalist, critic, sportswriter, naturalist, outdoorsman, hunter, falconer, bird breeder, dog breeder, and now a novelist.  Born in Boston, he has lived in the dusty roadside hamlet of Magdalena in southwestern New Mexico for more than 30 years and has published a dozen books, including the superb Querencia—the literary artist’s autobiographical...

This is a massive biography of an economic historian whose popular fame rests on his having been made one of 65 Companions of Honour by the Queen while remaining a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It suffers from many of the difficulties encountered by biographers of men of thought.  Like William Howard...

Boyd Cathey is an 11th generation Carolina Tar Heel who was mentored by and worked with Russell Kirk.  The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage is written reverentially, just as one might reflect on the memory of one’s mother.  For the South is not just any region of the United States, like the...

In 2004, Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde published The Populist Zeitgeist, an attempt to define the growingly important but haphazardly applied concept of “populism.”  He had an emotional as well as an academic interest, because “far-right” nationalism had enmeshed his own brother.  His influential conclusion was that populism was an unlikable “thin ideology,” almost infinitely...

There is no pleasing Duke University law professor Brandon L. Garrett, author of the death-penalty-abolishment screed End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, though much about the current state of criminal justice should please him.  Nationwide, death sentences and executions are at historic lows, yet he claims that the...

Today, a century after the close of the “war to end all wars,” the prospect of achieving what the U.N. and other such garrulous bodies call “global peace” seems ever more remote.  According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if only we could establish everywhere the right to equality before the law, freedom of...

Dr. Daniel Mahoney, the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College, has written a most scholarly and challenging book, in which he argues that “humanitarianism” without grounding in faith is a danger to our civilization.  This philosophy seeks to create a “new man” and produce a “new humanity,” with roots in Auguste Comte’s “religion...

However much they may enjoy watching Captain von Trapp sing “Edelweiss” in The Sound of Music, most Catholic intellectuals nowadays are squeamish about delving too deeply into the production’s historical background.  Such reticence is hardly surprising, for in Von Trapp’s day Catholic Austria was led by Engelbert Dollfuss—a man deeply enthusiastic about his Germanic heritage,...

Of the making of books about Churchill there is no end.  The latest is the best to date.  Andrew Roberts reduces Churchill’s epic life to some 1,100 pages, offering a précis of the great events in which he was involved while drawing on 40 new sources.  These include the private diaries of King George VI...

What you might find on a long walk, a determined walk, a walk of exploration, you never know, of course, until you take the next step.  And the next; and the next—in Rory Stewart’s case, across the constantly revelatory terrain of the borderlands shared since Roman times by England and Scotland. To what end?  Do...

One of the root problems facing our beleaguered world is that many of our contemporaries are belaboring the past as a burden, believing that the legacy and traditions of Western Civilization are a millstone around modernity’s neck.  Cast off the shackles of the past, with its outmoded morality and outdated way of doing things, and...

Throughout the Introduction and into the first chapter of Ship of Fools you seem to be seated before a television screen listening to, and watching, Tucker Carlson in his nightly broadcast.  The voice is the same, the tone is the same; so is the manner.  Then, almost imperceptibly, you find yourself slipping—or rather being slipped—from...

With the Midterm Elections safely behind us, should we count on the left to renounce the fun of castigating nonleft types for their racism, sexism, and hetero normativism?  Not on a bet. We’re at a new place in the world.  I mean a world that, especially in its European components—this includes, naturally, us—has to widespread...

In an age of anti-elite anger, it might seem otiose to publish an academic analysis of aristocratic ideas in Western thought.  But as the post-1945 order rattles itself to pieces, it is time to look past its bankrupted beliefs and discredited leaders for other guiding principles—principles based on history instead of ill-defined and naive hopes,...

There’s a lot of buncombe in Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House.  Doubtless Chronicles readers heard some of it when the book was released on September 13, as the mainstream media played and replayed on the hour reports of Chief of Staff John Kelly allegedly grousing in the author’s presence that Trump’s “an...

Author of several novels and a memorable autobiographical work entitled Our Father’s Fields (1998), as well as a leading light of the Abbeville Institute, James Kibler has produced in the present work an indispensable study of the classical influence on Southern literature.  Other literary historians and critics of Southern letters have explored this territory; however,...

British journalist Peter Hitchens is a great controversialist.  His most famous work remains his 1999 Abolition of Britain, which lamented the decline of Britain since the 1960’s, focusing particularly on the decay of morals and the rise of pop culture.  Since then Hitchens has written books critical of numerous aspects of modern British society including...

Mr. Neumayr’s comprehensive and exhaustive work, a fine example of investigative journalism, should deeply worry Catholics, laity and clerics alike. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the first Latin-American pope in Catholicism’s centuries-long history.  He is also, Neumayr quips, “the Pope they have been waiting for,” whose messages support Marxists and Marxism, shockingly unlike the statements issued...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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:...