The Never-Ending Threat of Utopia
The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin. Encounter Books, 2020. Hardcover, 288 pages, $29. Reviewed by Robert Grant Price Feudal times are here again. This is a thesis Joel Kotkin hammers to a fine point in The Coming of...
The President’s Hidden Hand
Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins by Annie Jacobsen. Back Bay Books, 2019. Paperback, 560 pages, $19. Reviewed by Michael J. Ard Is lethal covert action compatible with American democracy?...
An Ambitious Forgotten President
President Without a Party: The Life of John Tyler by Christopher J. Leahy. Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 512 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Brian Cervantez One cool February night in 1845, two weeks prior to the inauguration of recently elected...
Beha’s Capacity for God: Sophie Wilder Revisited
What Happened to Sophie Wilder: A Novel by Christopher R. Beha. Tin House Books, 2012. Paperback, 253 pages, $16. Reviewed by Joshua Hren In his new novel The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, Harper’s editor Christopher Beha makes grace a noisome concern, not least...
A Plutarchian Life of Brown and Lincoln
The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom by H. W. Brands. Doubleday, 2020. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30. Reviewed by Carl Rollyson H. W. Brands has written perhaps his most fluent book, a constantly engaging study...
The Clandestine Poet
In Code: Poems. by Maryann Corbett. Able Muse Press, 2020. Paperback, 92 pages, $20. Reviewed by Alfred Nicol Maryann Corbett spent thirty-five years working for the Minnesota Legislature in the Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Here is how she describes the...
Delaware’s Civilian Conservation Corps and the Advent of an Artist
By William F. Meehan III The first of the original thirteen states to ratify the federal Constitution in 1787, Delaware occupies a small niche in the Boston–Washington, D.C., urban corridor along the Middle Atlantic seaboard. It is the second smallest state in the...
Burke’s Defense of Natural Rights and the Limits of Political Power
Bruce P. Frohnen For decades, now, many among that ever-shrinking group of centrist and conservative academics have engaged in sometimes acrimonious debates over the sources and nature of our constitutional order. The debate centers on the question whether the United...
The Civil Tongue
Wonder and Wrath by A. M. Juster. Paul Dry Books, 2020. Paperback, 85 pages, $14.95. Reviewed by Dan Rattelle It is difficult to imagine a more upstanding literary citizen than A. M. Juster. His work as an editor, lately of First Things and now at Plough,...
Ah, just your typical 663-page light summer beach read for a @ubookman book review. Makes Wealth of Nations look like a Substack essay.