August, named after Augustus Caesar, is a good time to look at three books that apply lessons from ancient Rome. The best is Harry Sidebottom’s Those Who Are About to Die: A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator (Knopf, 2026). In it we can learn that the lean gladiators of Hollywood spectaculars were rare: A diet heavy on Read More ›
Jurgen Overhoff’s George Washington and Frederick the Great: Parallel Lives (Princeton, 2026) shows how two great leaders had different ethics of leadership that helped to create two different political cultures. Washington held himself accountable to Congress and saw the value of checks and balances: The US became a democratic republic. Frederick was an autocrat, and Prussia (which became the cornerstone Read More ›
Tomorrow is Flag Day, commemorating a Congressional resolution in 1777 that “The flag of the United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white.” Next Tuesday is the official publication date of Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome (Simon & Schuster). Maybe a coincidence, but Greg Jackson’s book is worth reading at a time when Read More ›
“A fine book to carry to the barricades.” That’s how Kirkus Reviews praised Bummerland: Ruin and Restoration in Trump’s New America by American Studies Professor Randolph Lewis (U. of Nebraska Press, 2026). But is this what we’ve come to in America: Teaching students and readers that the whole country is “a woodchipper for the soul”? Lewis plies his trade at The University Read More ›
In December I reviewed Jane Leavy’s audaciously-titled Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It. Howard Husock’s The Projects: A New History of Public Housing (NYU Press, 2025) comes from an academic publisher, which almost guarantees a boring title. A better title would have been: Make Me HUD Secretary: I Know What’s Wrong With “Affordable Read More ›
Karl Zinsmeister’s Sweet Charity (Mountain Marsh Media, 2026) has the semi-misleading subtitle Why private giving is so important to America (and must not be wrecked by politics). Semi-, that is, because while Zinsmeister’s opening chapter makes a cultural and political argument, the bulk of this delightful book is a travelogue of community-bolstering charities in Philadelphia and Florida, some wonderful, some Read More ›
Leo Damrosch’s Storyteller (Yale University Press, 2025) is a valentine to Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), whose life could have been co-designed by the novelist’s bipolar Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson, best known for Treasure Island, combined a strict Scottish Presbyterian upbringing with a love of South Seas sensuousness. Damrosch describes how Stevenson rebelled against Christianity but “a gnawing sense of conscience Read More ›
Jenny Taylor’s Saving Journalism (Pippa Rann Books, UK, 2025) ably chronicles the rise and fall of public interest reporting, and what we have lost as the powerful can now operate with fewer restraints. She notes how western culture’s journalistic innovators until about 1900 were “typically outsiders, religious dissenters who lived by a specific narrative: a narrative of reality and of Read More ›
December is midway between the end of the baseball season in October and spring training reawakening in a Florida or Arizona February, so here’s a baseball book that can keep us warm at night. Jane Leavy’s Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) includes many proposals including my favorite: Read More ›
Thanksgiving week is the best time of year for homeless persons looking for food handouts—but why are they homeless? Addiction, alcoholism, and mental illness are leading causes, but Michael Ullman’s Household Deformation: The Rise and Permanence of Modern Homelessness (National Homeless Information Project, 2025) also shows the impact of family non-formation and deformation. Divorce and loneliness contribute to an increase in Read More ›
Intellectuals who paid attention when Molly Worthen became a Christian—see Olasky Books for August—should note as well the publication this month of Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously (Encounter). In it the formerly agnostic scholar gives reasons, including “the brute facts of the big bang,” for his new belief in God. Much of the book details Murray’s exploration of Christian claims. Read More ›
Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish new year’s celebration—begins on September 22, so this is a good time to review four new Judaism-related books, starting with the entertaining Eminent Jews (Henry Holt, 2025). David Denby offers four long but readable chapters on Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein. The Brooks section is best with its specific detail of how the genius of Read More ›