Category: Reviews

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...

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...

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...

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  Cast off the shackles of the past, with its outmoded morality and outdated way of doing things, and...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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:...

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...

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,...

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,...

“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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...