So much from the left (and also the right) is predictably roaring and boring. George Packer for two decades, though, has provided unexpected insights through his biting writing in The New Yorker and now The Atlantic. His Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) displays egalitarianism but does not accept the traditional left/right spectrum. Read More ›
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the independence of modern Israel. Few in 1948 thought it would last as long, surrounded as it was by a hostile Muslim world, now only partly hostile. The U.S. has been crucial in that survival, and Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish Read More ›
After half a century of helping girls and women to be all they can be professionally, maybe it’s time to see what’s happening to boys and men. Richard Reeves points out in Of Boys and Men (Brookings, 2022) that “the modern male is struggling.” He then explains “why it matters, and what to do about it.” Reeves shows that one Read More ›
Four days from now is the Ides of March, which brings to mind the most famous death on that day, Julius Caesar’s — and that gets me thinking about all the little Caesars, Kaisers, and Czars that came after him. Krishan Kumar’s Visions of Empire (Princeton, 2017) readably tells the story of Rome and five other empires: Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian/Soviet, Read More ›
For a mere $5,000 you can host an anti-racist dinner with seven friends as guests plus two hired guests as agitators. As New York magazine reports, “A collection of affluent white women, equipped with varying degrees of vanity and self-delusion, gather at a well-appointed dinner table. There, they face down a pair of unsparing judges prepared to see right through Read More ›
I’ll focus this month on books by and about four God-haunted genius writers: Ray Bradbury, Bob Dylan, John Donne, and Samuel Adams. The Library of America brought out last year The Ray Bradbury Collection, a two-volume assortment of stories and novellas by the science fiction and fantasy writer who died in 2012 at age 91. Captain Hart, the protagonist of Read More ›
This newsletter usually emphasizes secular books, but ‘tis the season to recommend books with Christian themes. I’ll start with Christopher Hutchinson’s excellent Recovering Humility (New Growth Press, 2018), which notes that “the surest way to a greater humility is to gaze upon Christ hanging on the cross.” True, and it all starts with a baby in a manger. Hutchinson wisely Read More ›
Peter Fritzche’s Hitler’s First Hundred (Basic, 2020) begins with a brilliant scene. At 11:15 a.m. on Jan. 30, 1933, conservative aristocrat Franz von Papen meets with Adolf Hitler, who wants to be chancellor of Germany — the CEO. Another key person in the meeting, nationalist media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, is wary of Hitler. The three are late for their meeting with 84-year-old Read More ›
Thomas Kidd’s excellent and tightly-written Thomas Jefferson (Yale University Press, 2022) notes that our third president “touted frugality” in government, but his personal life was different. (As John Adams put it, “Jefferson has a habit as well as a disposition to expensive Living…. He could not Subdue his Pride and Vanity.”) This becomes poignant in relation to the slaves Jefferson owned. Kidd notes that Read More ›
Doctors are supposed to live by the Latin phrase generally translated as First, Do No Harm: Primum non nocere. Andrew Scull’s Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (Harvard University Press, 2022) is a history of purported cures for mental illness that have often been worse than the disease. Desperate Remedies is so important and readable that for the first time I’m Read More ›