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 ›
The best biography I’ve read the past year is Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Robert E. Lee saw northern victory resulting from a brutal turning of soldiers into cannon fodder, and did not admit that slavery was wrong. But James Longstreet, Lee’s right hand after Stonewall Jackson died, joined the Republican Read More ›
Frederick Douglass after his escape from slavery wrote three terrific autobiographies, including My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), which since 2010 has been reprinted at least eight times by various publishers. Far less known is the escape from Georgia to Boston of enslaved Ellen and William Craft in 1848: She could pass for white and disguised herself as a wealthy Read More ›
In this newsletter I mostly review nonfiction, but on a wintry night many people want to snuggle up with a novel. Here are four suggestions, starting with Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For is In the Library (Alison Watts translation, Doubleday, 2023). It’s a charming tale from Japan of people searching for change and getting the nudge they need Read More ›
I almost always focus on recent books, but this month I want to mention one from 2014 that’s received new life because of—to quote last month’s University World News headline—“Dismay over university’s sacking of scholar denied a visa.” Rowena Xiaoqing He, author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan), currently lives in Austin and until recently Read More ›