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...
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...
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...
Imagined Americas

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...
Free Ride

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,...
Is the Religious Right Really so Incomprehensible?

Is the Religious Right Really so Incomprehensible?

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism By Benjamin M. Freidman. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. Hardcover, 560 pages, $37.50 Reviewed by James E. Hartley Sometimes it seems like discussions in this country are taking place in two isolated camps. Every now and then, that suspicion...