With the new administration that’s nine days away committed to revising rules regarding transgenderism, journalists reporting the debate should be informed biblically, biologically, and historically. J. Alan Branch’s Affirming God’s Image (Lexham Press, 2019) does well on all three dimensions in a tight 144 pages. Branch shows that participants in the ancient Roman cult of Cybele seemed to embrace transgenderism. Read More ›
The Wall Street Journal stated, “Robert Harris is incapable of writing an unenjoyable book,” and that’s true in the present tense. Harris is in line to hit 70 in 2027 and at some point his skills will diminish, but now… wow, this former journalist with a love of history knows how to write, as his two most recent novels (both Read More ›
November, a month that culminates in Thanksgiving, is a good time to review history books—so let’s gallop through eight, starting with Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power (Knopf, 2024). Timothy Ryback weaves a story of betrayals, backroom deals, and one often-ignored aspect: the support Hitler received from dominant media. Publishing mogul Alfred Hugenberg thought the 1,600 newspapers he controlled would Read More ›
One recipe for a good book or movie: Place sympathetic characters facing personal difficulties within a large looming disaster. Think Casablanca, or The Lord of the Rings, or The Cypresses Believe in God. Joseph Kanon’s Shanghai (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is a terrific novel set in the Chinese city within a 1939 vortex of fascism and communism, sex and violence—and Read More ›
Victor David Hanson’s The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation (Basic, 2024) has chapters on the destruction of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan that the author, or a good editor, should have abridged. Maybe the repetition, though, can drum into our heads a lesson we try to keep out: “Modern societies are not immune to the horror of Read More ›
On July 4 we celebrated the rare revolution that worked. This page focuses on two wonderfully readable books about the mostly unsuccessful 17th century revolution that preceded America’s 18th century one, and the partly successful 19th century revolution that followed. Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 (Knopf, 2023) features vivid, specific detail. Some on Read More ›
We all tend to favor life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what happens when the pursuit ruins children’s happiness (and sometimes keeps them from life itself)? Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege (U. of Chicago, 2023) shows that the national Wars on Poverty and Drugs have been less effective than the War on Family that the cultural left has Read More ›
Two decades ago John Judis and Ruy Teixeira prophesied big changes in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority. Their new book asks, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (Henry Holt, 2023). Essentially, college-educated professionals (some with unorthodox lifestyles) have now pushed out “many of the people in the deindustrialized towns and small cities of middle America [and left them] stripped Read More ›
Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Crossway, 2023) has probably left dozens of historians groaning, Why didn’t I think of that? Wilson could have written one more bloviating account of how the WEIRD revolution — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic — affected the world during the past 250 years. Instead, he concentrated on the one Read More ›