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...
Schlumping toward Altenburg
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...
Rocket Age Drama
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...
Imagined Americas
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...
Facing the Past
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...
Nerve Plasm Palpitations?
Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition by Patricia S. Churchland W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. Hardback, $27.95 Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl A caveat to a common reader who might think to read Patricia Churchland’s Conscience: The Origins of Moral...
Free Ride
Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew Crawford. William Morrow, 2020. Hardcover, 368 pages, $29. Reviewed by Addison Del Mastro “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!” So reads a famous American propaganda poster from World War II,...
Aristotle’s Timely Guide to Human Happiness
By Auguste Meyrat One of the paradoxes of modernity is that as living has become easier and more pleasurable, people have become sadder. Depression and loneliness were already major problems in the developed world, and have become even worse with the COVID-19...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."