Wilson’s (Self) Determination

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

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

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

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

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

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...