“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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
The best poetry—great poetry—happens when sound, rhythm, and image bring about a mysterious feeling of wholeness that somehow draws mind, body, and spirit together in what both Yeats and Eliot envisioned as a unified dance. What we call “the power of the word” is really a pattern of words in a rhythm originating in heartbeat...
“I am going to seek a great perhaps . . . ” —François Rabelais Sale’s theme is the restoration of “human scale” in all our works: architectural, political, economic, educational, and technological. His thesis is that only radical decentralization can achieve this aim. Sale first ventured into this territory with a book called Human Scale,...
Christopher Sandford of this parish is not only an adorner of these pages but has also garnered considerable status as a cultural historian. His inquiring eyes range widely, playing over everything from cricket to Kurt Cobain, the Great War to The Great Escape, Conan Doyle to Eric Clapton, and countless other late-19th- and 20th-century Anglospheric...
A century ago, the Kansas-born and Vermont-based writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher spoke of the importance of place, as well as of time, in the formation of a culture and in the shaping of individuals within a culture: Some wise man has said that the date of a man’s life depends not on the calendar, but...
E.U. enthusiasts have recently scored a hat trick of good news. First, there was the election of Rothschild banking protégé Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of France along with a parliamentary majority, followed by the much-improved pre-election poll ratings of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and now the Tories’ loss of their party’s once solid parliamentary...
The first thought that occurred to me upon receiving a review copy of David Garrow’s hefty biography of our former president was, besides its weight (four pounds), how the jacket photograph perfectly expresses what is revealed in 1,084 pages of text. It was taken in 1990 while Obama was at Harvard Law School, three years...
Following the publication of Wise Blood in 1952, whispered speculation commenced among the novelist’s relatives, who wondered how an innocent Catholic girl from a genteel Southern background could have acquired the worldly experience to write the early scene in which Hazel Motes enters a stall in the men’s room at the local train station, reads...
The Retreat of Western Liberalism, by Edward Luce (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press; 240 pp., $24.00). Almost by the author’s admission, the title of this book is a falsehood. Liberalism is not retreating. It is being pushed back by “populists,” which is what liberals call people who are against liberalism because they are, for the...
As the author of a travel book as well as many novels, I’ve often suspected that writing a superior work in the first category is a greater challenge than writing one in the second. The comparative difficulties become clear when you develop the same material, as nonfiction first and then again as a novel, with...
George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England was published in 1935. It is an exceptionally well-written book and became a cult classic, its haunting title suggesting a mysterious crime, as in a thriller. Dangerfield’s theme was the decay of the civilization created by the British Liberal movement in the years that led up to...
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that...
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that Nixon’s tragic...
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), dean of St. Patrick’s Church of Ireland cathedral in Dublin, was a most remarkable man. To begin with, he wrote two of the cleverest, most original books in English, Gulliver’s Travels and A Tale of a Tub, in prose that David Hume described as “the first polite prose we have,” i.e., the...
This is an excellent and very readable book about the life and work of a man with whose name every educated person is familiar, but about whom (and which) few people in America today know very much, though his 100th birthday in 1869, only a decade after his death, was spectacularly celebrated across the United...
A casual mention by a friend of The Magnificent Ambersons, the novel by the Midwestern American novelist and playwright Booth Tarking ton (1869-1946) translated to the silver screen by Orson Welles, sent me to my library to renew my acquaintance with a book I read many years ago. Instead of Ambersons, however, the book I...
Stephen B. Presser, Chronicles’ legal-affairs editor, identifies a crisis in American legal education. In his book Law Professors, he shows us why a newly minted graduate of an elite American law school has no clue how to handle a case or provide useful legal services. This is not a matter of just being young or...
Chronicles’ readers probably know James Kirchick better as the author of articles on Ron Paul’s newsletters than as an expert on European politics. The up and coming neoconservative journalist published his exposés of Ron Paul in The New Republic in 2008 and revisited the issue in the pages of The Weekly Standard in 2011. Friends...
Yale’s Little Histories represent an admirable project, whereby true experts perform the exceedingly difficult task of summarizing a large field of knowledge in a short space, and in an accessible manner. Ideally, the resulting book offers a good introduction for the novice, while even the most knowledgeable reader will gain some new insight. Even within...
If we don’t like the way of life around us, why not live differently? Why go along with something so inhuman and unrewarding? So asks Anthony Esolen in his new book. Good criticism calls for a conception of what should be as well as an analysis of what is. Esolen provides both. Like any social...
If Ryszard Legutko is correct, there is increasingly little difference between the devil we know and the devil we don’t. He makes a compelling case for this claim. The totalitarian temptation, regardless of differences in time, place, and ideology, is ever present. The fact is especially troubling as modern man is aided by unprecedented technological...
As its subtitle indicates, this book dispels a number of imprecisions, equivocations, and outright lies regarding the Islamic conquest of Spain in late antiquity or the early medieval period. (The Romans called it Hispania, a word that evolved into the medieval Latin Spannia and eventually the modern España.) Its author, for many years professor of...
Confined to a three-man tent on a rainy day in the canyons of southeastern Utah, I continued by lantern light my rereading of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, first published a quarter-century ago as the first volume in The Border Trilogy, and got a good start on its immediate sequel, The Crossing. McCarthy’s...
Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, by John B. Boles (New York: Basic Books; 626 pp., $35.00). This excellent, very well-written, and highly readable book is the “full-scale biography” the author set out to write. It succeeds further as an affirmation of the historian’s (and his readers’) need to accept the past on its own terms...
Roger Stone is a longtime political operative who has worked for every Republican president since Richard Nixon, and numerous presidential and other candidates as well. Stone retains great admiration for Ronald Reagan, but now has only disdain for the Bush family. The Making of the President 2016 recounts what he saw during the Trump campaign,...
What is the justification for abortion? Is abortion a moral or therapeutic concept? Medical or legal? Sociological or personal? These considerations underlie Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, a narrative of the comprehensive criminal enterprise of Kermit Gosnell, M.D., Philadelphia’s notorious baby killer and drug trafficker, by the Irish journalists Ann...
An unfortunate effect of more than two decades of war between the West and the Middle East, and the resulting terrorist campaigns launched from there, is the replacement of the charm, even the magic, the historical Persia held for Europeans—and for me—by their opposite: contempt, disgust, even fear. In the late 80’s and the 90’s...
The Habsburg Empire: A New History, by Pieter M. Judson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard; 592 pp., $35.00). This book continues the arguments historians have made over the past three decades that challenge the long-received and -accepted view of the Habsburg Empire as an anachronism among European states in the 19th century. As Judson says, historians had...
Progressive arrogance. Technocratic overreach. Social engineering. Racial tension. Expanding executive powers. Aggressive and endless waves of “experts.” Economic disparity and unrest. “Us” versus “them.” All are characteristics of social and political life in recent years in the United States. So much so that some pundits and observers apparently find the combination alarming and unique—even unprecedented—in...
Winston Churchill is one of the most closely examined (and lionized) of all politicians, and it is accordingly difficult to think of new angles from which to view him and his legacy. But now here are two original and complementary studies coming at once, one profiling his wife, Clementine, the other examining the impressive public...
“Half-alien and wholly undesirable” was Lady Astor’s assessment of Winston Churchill. For Winston’s father, Randolph Churchill, had taken an American wife, “a dollar princess,” as many cash-strapped members of the English aristocracy did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Lord Randolph, dead at age 46, left no inheritance. Poor Winston had to...
In spring, my thoughts turn first to the Southwest, that most beautiful and haunting part of it especially, the canyon country of southeastern Utah. There was a time when I pulled my horses down there every year toward the end of March and spent a week or ten days riding and camping south of Moab...
John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many, by Richard Alan Ryerson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; 555 pp., $60.00). This very excellent and elegantly written book by the editor of the Adams Papers between 1983 and 2001 draws on the second American President’s entire corpus of political writing, from his books...
Picture this: A president, working partly through a political appointee at CIA headquarters, presses the intelligence community to come up with the “right” intelligence that this president needs to justify his actions. The president has singled out a particular foreign leader for demonization, has convinced himself that this leader is the embodiment of evil, and...
Arron Banks looks out proudly and pugnaciously from the cover of Bad Boys of Brexit like a character in a Hogarth engraving, flanking the equally Hogarthian Nigel Farage in a photo taken as Farage faced the globe’s agog media on the auspicious morning of June 24, 2016. The four men pictured—Banks, Farage, Richard Tice, and...
How many “final” books can one man write? For most men, the answer is one. John Lukacs is not most men, however. In early 2013, ISI Books released History and the Human Condition, a collection of previously published (though revised) material that the press declared to be “perhaps John Lukacs’s final word on the great...
About 20 years ago the late George Garrett, a professor of English and writing at the University of Virginia and a contributing editor to this magazine, told me an anecdote meant to illustrate the intellectual and social naiveté of students at one of the most prestigious schools in the country. After George requested his sophomore...