The Enduring Mystery of War
War: How Conflict Shaped Us by Margaret MacMillan. Random House, 2020. Hardcover, 336 pages, $30. Reviewed by Michael J. Ard Times were tough for Ötzi the Iceman. Found thirty years ago in the Italian Alps, the multi-wounded corpse of the five-thousand-year-old hunter...
The Economics of Everywhere and Nowhere
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Hardcover, 400 pages, $28. Reviewed by Henry George America is ground zero for the new economy taking shape that will affect all our lives in the years and decades...
Ignorant Armies
Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters by Deborah Stone. W. W. Norton, 2021. Hardcover, 291 pages, $27. Reviewed by Michial Farmer “What, then, is truth?” Nietzsche sneers in his essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.” A mobile army of...
Counter-Tradition of the American Imagination
Geographies of Flight: Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler by William Merrill Decker. Northwestern University Press, 2020. Paper, 294 pages, $43. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Aboard the Arbella—or maybe in Southampton before the colonists departed for the New World—John...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!