Ananyo Bhattacharya’s biography of the genius mathematician John von Neumann is rich in details about the man's work but lacking in characterizations of the man himself.
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Books in Brief: February 2023
Brief reviews of Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations, by Benedict Beckeld, and The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872, by Daniel J. Burge.
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The Age of Nixon
Russell Kirk, a venerated conservative man of letters, weighs in on Nixon’s response to the media-incited campaign against him, from the July 1990 issue of Chronicles.
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Clap & Trap
John Lukacs dissects the self-important claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, world history would culminate in the inevitable acceptance of the American “liberal democratic” model worldwide.
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The Costs of Culture
M. E. Bradford illuminates the problem of a government agency, the NEH, that claims to promote “culture” but has instead become a source of handouts to well-connected educational institutions.
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Ireland’s Arc to a Post-Christian Nation
Crawford Gribben has produced a fascinating history of Christian Ireland from its promising beginnings, in the age following the fall of the Roman Empire, to its dramatic decline in recent decades.
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What We Are Reading: December 2022
Short reviews of Feminism & Freedom, by Michael Levin, and the Sword of Honor trilogy, by Evelyn Waugh.
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Books in Brief: December 2022
Short reviews of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti, and The Black Boom, by Jason Riley.
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Unsmearing Warren G. Harding
In The Jazz Age President, Ryan Walters sets the record straight about the often-misrepresented Warren G. Harding, who, in his brief time as president, led the country out of a crisis.
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What We Are Reading: November 2022
Short reviews of The Fox in the Attic, by Richard Hughes, and Boke Named the Gouernour, by Sir Thomas Elyot.
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Reading Your Way Around the World
In Around the World in 80 Books, David Damrosch makes a literary journey that loosely follows Jules Verne's classic geographical adventure of similar title.
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Books in Brief: November 2022
Short reviews of Free: A Child and a History at the End of History, by Lea Ypi, and The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free-Market Era, by Gary Gerstle.
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Of Demons and Ghosts
The 2022 film Prey is a predictable woke prequel to the 1987 film Predator. A better choice for adventure is the 1935 classic, The Ghost Goes West, starring Robert Donat.
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Of Opposite Minds: Maistre and Mill
Joseph de Maistre, a brilliant wordsmith, was an elegant defender of the old order, while John Stuart Mill, in his plodding prose, helped to usher in welfare democracy and the modern administrative state.
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Race Erased
Racism, Not Race starts from the assumption that biological races do not exist, rants leftward from there, and finishes by slapping the white-supremacist label on Trump voters.
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Rings of Intersectionality
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.
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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.