Ireland Since the Famine: An Appreciation
Ireland Since the Famine: 1850 to the Present by F. S. L. Lyons. Fontana Press, [1971] 1985. Paperback, 880 pages. Reviewed by John Rossi Fifty years ago, a book appeared that refined the writing and understanding of modern Irish history. F. S. L. Lyons’s...
Of Prophets and Presidents
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...
Wilson’s (Self) Determination
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....
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...
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...
"If classical teachers believe that truth, beauty, and goodness can indeed change the world, then the sort of student (and teacher and school) described by Esolen is a net gain for this world. And his Classical Catechism serves as a helpful tool in building the necessary common