Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom by Spencer W. McBride. Oxford University Press, 2021. Hardcover, 269 pages, $30. Reviewed by John Bicknell America in 1844 was a religious place. But it was not, in...
Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe By Larry Wolff. Stanford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 304 pages, from $30. Reviewed by Kevin J. McNamara This work is a species of modern intellectual history in the tradition of Orientalism, by Edward W....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Schlump by Hans Herbert Grimm. NYRB Classics, 2016. Paperback, 288 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Michael Shindler There are the great German books of the First World War that everyone knows: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of...
V2: A Novel of World War II by Robert Harris. Random House, 2020. Hardcover, 320 pages, $29. Reviewed by Robert Huddleston The unconditional surrender of all German forces in early May 1945 triggered a mad dash by the Allies to exploit the defeated enemy’s military...
After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division by Samuel Goldman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Hardcover, 208 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by John G. Grove In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre described a world in which moral language had lost all...
Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder. Basic Books, 2021. Hardcover, 656 pages, $35. Reviewed by Miles Smith IV In his 1953 opus The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk summed up John Calhoun’s contribution to intellectual conservatism succinctly when he noted that...
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