book reviews

Let's just start with her individualism.

John Wilson on “the Short 68,” “the Long 68,” and what’s missing from a new account of the protests and their legacy.

Alan Jacobs on Andrew Delbanco’s ‘The War Before the War,’ the horrors of the fugitive slave laws, and the costs of union.

Alice B. Lloyd on the homespun magical realism of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, ‘Killing Commendatore.’

Adam Roberts reviews ‘Red Moon,’ the latest novel from science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson.

How science fiction and rock music shaped one another: Mark Hemingway reviews Jason Heller’s ‘Strange Stars.’

Michael Warren reviews Bob Woodward’s book about life in Trump World

Christine Rosen on the high fashion and low blows in ‘When Life Gives You Lululemons’

Ethan Epstein on imagining nuclear war with North Korea.

Alan Jacobs on how Silicon Valley came to dominate our vision of the future.

Alice B. Lloyd on the politically loaded sci-fi thriller ‘Vox’—which wants very much to be ‘The Handmaid’s Tale 2.0.’

Alan Jacobs reviews Edward Tenner’s ‘The Efficiency Paradox.’

Amy Henderson reviews the new novel by the author of ‘Under the Tuscan Sun.’

B.D. McClay on Sheila Heti’s ‘Motherhood’ and taking control by giving it up.

Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews the sequel to Allison Pearson’s ‘I Don’t Know How She Does It.’

Evgenia Citkowitz’s The Shades, reviewed

Amy Henderson on the case for warts-and-all biographies.

The New York Times's Amy Chozick, in campaign memoir Chasing Hillary, makes Clinton’s failed campaign personal.

Muhammad Yunus, the father of microcredit, thinks he knows how to fix capitalism, end poverty, and even get rid of carbon emissions. Here's what he’s missing.

A new book recently caught our attention: It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics by David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University in Chicago. We weren't aware that Democrats needed the advice of the title, having…

The key to reading history of Nazi Germany, a wise professor once explained to me, is to attempt to understand the logic and mentality of those who embraced the Nazi movement without ever losing sight of what an ultimately absurd and fundamentally evil project theirs was. This is the approach…

Vice President Mike Pence’s daughter Charlotte wrote—and his wife, Karen, illustrated—a children’s book about the family bunny Marlon Bundo. It’s not Beatrix Potter or Watership Down. But it’s on time for the Easter theme, charmingly illustrated, and needless to say well-intentioned. Who doesn’t…

By January 2009, nearly a half century had passed since the Soviet Union sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit. In the midst of the handoff from the Bush administration to the Obama administration, a member of the incoming transition team at NASA, frustrated by how static the agency had become,…

On Saturday mornings, I make eggs and bacon for my four children and wife—usually a dozen eggs and most of the package of bacon—before shoveling the kids into the car, hopping into the driver’s seat, and pretending my minivan is a Mustang so that we get to catechism class on time. By the time I…

August Snow was one of last year’s sleeper hits—and deservedly so. The beautifully written, fast-paced thriller gave readers a tour of Detroit and its suburbs, and introduced them to a charming new literary hero: the half-black, half-Mexican lead character, the eponymous Mr. Snow.

A half-century after her death, Carson McCullers is best known for The Member of the Wedding, her 1946 novel about a motherless 12-year-old girl who watches the planning for her brother’s nuptials and feels distanced from the rest of the family. Adapted for stage and screen, McCullers’s story is…

Before sunrise on Saturday, December 14, 1799, George Washington woke up so sick he could barely breathe. His wife Martha summoned George Rawlins, a Mount Vernon overseer, who knew just what to do. He opened a vein in the former president’s arm and drained about 12 ounces of blood. Three physicians…

Like any dutiful Washington swamp creature, I’ve spent the last few days holed up with Fire and Fury. Which is not, if you’ve been in news-cycle hibernation, the new fragrance from Ivanka. Rather, it is a book by Michael Wolff about life inside Mar-a-Lago North, aka the Trump White House.

Imagine being repudiated by Stephen Bannon, the most repudiated man since Rasputin. Any ordinary person would feel obliged to slink off to the remotest mountains of Madagascar, never to be heard from again. But Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart News blogger whom Bannon disowned as a colleague 15…

In a recent conversation with an administrator who spent years at one of Manhattan’s most prestigious prep schools, I brought up the subject of gifted education. “I don’t know what you mean,” she responded without a trace of irony. “Every child is gifted in his or her own way.” In a culture where…

The Iranian political demonstrations now under way have roots in the Arab Spring upheavals that began in December 2010 in North Africa. The starting point was Tunisia, the rare success story of the Arab Spring—despite two major terrorist attacks in 2015 and this week’s protests against austerity,…

Presumptive 2020 Democratic front-runner Oprah Winfrey is responsible for unleashing any number of ills on the world: Dr. Phil; James Frey; The Butler. But give her credit for this: In the aggressively philistine world of reality television, Winfrey has been a lone voice stressing the importance of…

While you sift through all the end of the year Best Books/Movies/Moments lists, they can present a daunting task. You had high ambitions about how much reading you would get done throughout the year and set an over optimistic Goodreads challenge. Now you have mere days to meet a yearlong goal, and…

I met Chris Gibson early in his first congressional race, at a campaign breakfast my family hosted at our house in upstate New York in April 2010. The sun was out that morning but winter was still in the air, as it often is there at that time of year. The fields and orchards of the Hudson River…

Is it perverse to find ghost stories relaxing, even restful? Compared with the grim realities of the news and the appalling horrors of the last hundred years, even such outstanding classics as M. R. James’s “Count Magnus,” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”…

Reviews and News:

Donna Brazile's new book, Hacks, is doing boffo box office. So much so that the day after the book’s official release, Amazon was sold out of hardback copies.

What happened to Hillary Clinton en route to her appointment with destiny? Her new book, What Happened, portrays her as a lifelong fighter on behalf of noble causes, a woman whose quest for the power she deserved was thwarted by a cabal as vast as the one she once said had been after her husband…

On the same day last week, two Democratic women published political memoirs. One was a frank and engaging tale of butting heads with the media and doing battle with an upstart populist progressive. The other was written by Hillary Clinton.

A little over two years ago, The Scrapbook was pleased to welcome a new work of history from Philip F. Anschutz, chairman and CEO of The Weekly Standard’s parent company. In The Scrapbook’s words, Out Where the West Begins profiled “an astonishing variety of business entrepreneurs, visionaries,…

When Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print, in 1839, its wintry world of Christian revelry, chivalric honor, and Arthurian romance had long since vanished. Indeed, that world, or rather, medieval romantic literature as a whole, was antiquated even at the time the poem was written,…

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of futurology, the utopian and the apocalyptic. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, like the Book of Revelation, offers a bit of both. And why not? The function of imaginary futures is to deliver us from banality. The present, like the past, may be a…

When Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print, in 1839, its wintry world of Christian revelry, chivalric honor, and Arthurian romance had long since vanished. Indeed, that world, or rather, medieval romantic literature as a whole, was antiquated even at the time the poem was written,…

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of futurology, the utopian and the apocalyptic. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, like the Book of Revelation, offers a bit of both. And why not? The function of imaginary futures is to deliver us from banality. The present, like the past, may be a…

As somebody who makes a living, in part, by writing history, I have a confession against interest: I am not a big fan of biographies. My main problem is the constant interruption of narrative flow. Real life moves along multiple tracks simultaneously, but a biographer can only discuss one item at a…

As somebody who makes a living, in part, by writing history, I have a confession against interest: I am not a big fan of biographies. My main problem is the constant interruption of narrative flow. Real life moves along multiple tracks simultaneously, but a biographer can only discuss one item at a…

When it comes to understanding America’s place in the world, prospective presidential candidates could do much worse than read just three pieces of writing: Charles Krauthammer’s Weekly Standard essay “Decline Is a Choice” (Oct. 19, 2009); Robert Kagan’s New Republic article “Superpowers Don’t Get…

Dreams of a Northwest Passage connecting America to Asia tantalized empire builders from the earliest days of New World exploration. But after the Napoleonic Wars, the British turned this fascination into an obsession. Sending out the fleet to explore new trade routes kept the Royal Navy busy and…

Dreams of a Northwest Passage connecting America to Asia tantalized empire builders from the earliest days of New World exploration. But after the Napoleonic Wars, the British turned this fascination into an obsession. Sending out the fleet to explore new trade routes kept the Royal Navy busy and…

"Mother,” asks 10-year-old Johnny upon returning from school, “do I have a cliché on my face?”

Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes, and the intellectual ambitions of prog rockers.

Supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music, a master comparable in greatness of stature with Aristotle in philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci in art. No overstatement whatsoever attaches to this, the opening of the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. So vast and…

The prolific children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952) began her most famous work, Goodnight Moon, by describing how In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a red balloon. This 1947 classic has sold 27 million copies and, along with such other bestsellers as The Runaway…

Years ago the popular sociologist Vance Packard told me that he hated to have one of his books paired with another in a review. “All a review like that ever says is, ‘This book is better than that one,’ ” he complained, “and you can’t use a quote like that in an ad.”

In my time at Jesus College, Oxford (1956-58), I must have passed Eric Kennington’s evocative bust of T. E. Lawrence scores of times. It stood in the college lodge, on Turl Street, and portrayed a famous alumnus who had led an early life as an archaeologist before he became a British officer and…

Once upon a time, it didn’t matter if a clock tower in Spoleto kept time slightly differently than a tower in Assisi and far differently than one in Rome. In Why Time Flies we read about the experts in Greenwich who run data from 80 labs around the world into an algorithm that favors the more…

"In my opinion,” wrote Admiral Lord Charles Beresford to Leo Maxse, the editor of the British conservative magazine National Review, in April 1915, “Churchill is a serious danger to the State. After Antwerp, and now the Dardanelles, the Government really ought to get rid of him.” Six months later,…

Years ago the popular sociologist Vance Packard told me that he hated to have one of his books paired with another in a review. “All a review like that ever says is, ‘This book is better than that one,’ ” he complained, “and you can’t use a quote like that in an ad.”

Once upon a time, it didn’t matter if a clock tower in Spoleto kept time slightly differently than a tower in Assisi and far differently than one in Rome. In Why Time Flies we read about the experts in Greenwich who run data from 80 labs around the world into an algorithm that favors the more…

Supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music, a master comparable in greatness of stature with Aristotle in philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci in art. No overstatement whatsoever attaches to this, the opening of the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. So vast and…

"In my opinion,” wrote Admiral Lord Charles Beresford to Leo Maxse, the editor of the British conservative magazine National Review, in April 1915, “Churchill is a serious danger to the State. After Antwerp, and now the Dardanelles, the Government really ought to get rid of him.” Six months later,…

In 1926, the British author Henry Green (1905-1973) published the first of nine novels that would gain him critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. His mother didn’t quite know what to make of them. She loved to read, but didn’t partake of much fiction, so wasn’t sure how to assess her son’s…

In my time at Jesus College, Oxford (1956-58), I must have passed Eric Kennington’s evocative bust of T. E. Lawrence scores of times. It stood in the college lodge, on Turl Street, and portrayed a famous alumnus who had led an early life as an archaeologist before he became a British officer and…

Timothy S. Huebner has produced a valuable study of American constitutionalism, a study that could do enormous good if people read it. Gracefully written, it is also lengthy and scholarly, which means that readers must possess two qualities—patience and intellectual candor—to appreciate the…

In DC Confidential, New York Law School professor David Schoenbrod describes how Congress degenerated from a responsible legislature, one that took responsibility for difficult decisions, to a body continually looking to dodge blame. The book is an absolute delight. Schoenbrod begins with an…

In DC Confidential, New York Law School professor David Schoenbrod describes how Congress degenerated from a responsible legislature, one that took responsibility for difficult decisions, to a body continually looking to dodge blame. The book is an absolute delight. Schoenbrod begins with an…

Timothy S. Huebner has produced a valuable study of American constitutionalism, a study that could do enormous good if people read it. Gracefully written, it is also lengthy and scholarly, which means that readers must possess two qualities—patience and intellectual candor—to appreciate the…

Some eight miles west by south of the central North Carolina town of my boyhood, one comes upon red-clay dairy country, furnished with lush pastures and comfortable houses. Hawfields, as the neighborhood is called, dates from colonial times: The route of Cornwallis’s fateful retirement toward…

When Weldon Kees disappeared, at the age of 41, he seemed on the verge of becoming one of the more prominent American poets of his generation. He had three collections to his name, and his work had been published in such periodicals as Sewanee Review, Poetry, Harper's, and the New Yorker. But on…

There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the…

We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets.…

On January 26, 1945, this is what an American soldier in Belgium wrote home to his parents:

When we look back on the late-19th/early-20th century and think of the technological changes that made life “modern,” we usually imagine the conquests of distance: telegraphs and telephones, trains and steamships, automobiles and airplanes. We don’t think about canned goods, cigarettes, soda pop,…

We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets.…

There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the…

The United States has been at war for nearly a decade and a half, and although American military forces achieved tactical success in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have not been able to convert military victory into political success. This failure to consolidate military gains into stable order has…

What is there left to write about George Washington? What insights can be gleaned about a man who has been the subject of centuries of biographies—many devoted to bringing the "flesh and blood" Washington to life—yet who still seems, in his "icy majesty," to stand above and apart from us?

What is there left to write about George Washington? What insights can be gleaned about a man who has been the subject of centuries of biographies—many devoted to bringing the "flesh and blood" Washington to life—yet who still seems, in his "icy majesty," to stand above and apart from us?

Los Angeles County has 14 area codes. Not zip codes, area codes. (It has 320 zip codes.) Its population is larger than that of 42 states, its area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It has two mountain ranges, five rivers, two deserts, six major valleys, and a boundary that runs 70…

The ancient author of Ecclesiastes wrote, "Of making many books there is no end," and that is undeniably true as we consider Martin Luther. With the sole exception of Jesus Christ, more books have been written about Luther than about any other person who has ever lived. In 1983, the 500th…

The United States has been at war for nearly a decade and a half, and although American military forces achieved tactical success in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have not been able to convert military victory into political success. This failure to consolidate military gains into stable order has…

This volume includes 566 letters, less than one-fifth of those that have been preserved, but it seems clear that the ones chosen by the editors are representative. This is not a sanitized selection. A number reveal that Willa Cather (1873-1947) was not always able to transcend the prejudices of her…

Gerard Reve’s 1947 debut novel, a Dutch classic that is only now being published in English translation, carries a blurb in which Herman Koch, author of the 2009 bestseller The Dinner, calls it the "funniest, most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written."

It's a moment that washed-up comedians and humorless TV hosts still use when they're running low on material. On May 20, 2000, Charlton Heston lifted a revolutionary-era style flintlock long rifle over his head at the 129th National Rifle Association convention in Charlotte and announced that if…

A Texas high school junior who’s biologically female takes testosterone to "transition" to the other sex, and wins the state's wrestling championship for girls—even though other female players are not allowed to use performance-enhancing drugs, including testosterone. A secret Facebook group of…

How are we to approach the man? No one has ever gotten him quite right. Benjamin Franklin thought him, in a famous remark, “sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." Thomas Jefferson could never fully figure out what to make of such a witty, learned, emotionally open man. In our…

Journalists these days are regularly being beheaded. The two most recent cases were the work of the Islamic State, which this past summer, as shown to the world on slickly produced videos, dispatched freelancers Steven Sotloff and James Foley. Such atrocities at the hands of Islamic fanatics are…

It’s a moment that washed-up comedians and humorless TV hosts still use when they're running low on material. On May 20, 2000, Charlton Heston lifted a revolutionary-era style flintlock long rifle over his head at the 129th National Rifle Association convention in Charlotte and announced that if…

The campus novel is overripe for a renaissance. Because it will take a satirical rendering à la Lucky Jim—or perhaps dozens of them—to expose the painfully silly social politics of campus protest culture to the clarifying light of enough readers' wry, self-aware laughter. Unsurprisingly, few have…

In early 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species—published in Britain in November 1859—became a topic of conversation among a number of New England intellectuals. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read the Origin. So did Bronson Alcott, the father of…

In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the British and French armies sacked the Chinese Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), looting it of what the Chinese government today estimates to have been 150 million objects. The British effort was led by James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin, and with his blessing…

In early 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—published in Britain in November 1859—became a topic of conversation among a number of New England intellectuals. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read the Origin. So did Bronson Alcott, the father of…

This is a revolt of the masses, in this case masses of economic students from around the world who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis and have united in a movement they call Rethinking Economics. The leaders of the movement, which according to the Guardian has grown to 43 student…

Modern thinking about love tries to tame it: to exclude its elements of risk, self-abandon, and its challenges to self-transcendence. It seeks to demythologize love’s dimensions of wonder and gratitude so that they are reduced to problems to be diagnosed with a medical vocabulary and managed by…

This is a revolt of the masses, in this case masses of economic students from around the world who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis and have united in a movement they call Rethinking Economics. The leaders of the movement, which according to the Guardian has grown to 43 student…

Dante puts Pontius Pilate in the outermost circle of Hell, among the indolent—scant punishment, you might think, for the man who executed Jesus Christ. By letting Pilate off easy, Dante was situating himself firmly on one side of a centuries-old debate: Who was more responsible for killing Christ,…

"When you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others," then-senator Barack Obama told a standing-room-only crowd in 2006 at Xavier University's commencement, "whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help."…

J. Harvie Wilkinson III is a lawyer whom President Reagan appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. As a judge who writes for his court, Wilkinson is, of course, a legal writer; but here he has written for a general audience. His topic is the 1960s, a decade he knows…

"When you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others,” then-senator Barack Obama told a standing-room-only crowd in 2006 at Xavier University's commencement, "whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help."…

J. Harvie Wilkinson III is a lawyer whom President Reagan appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. As a judge who writes for his court, Wilkinson is, of course, a legal writer; but here he has written for a general audience. His topic is the 1960s, a decade he knows…

Dante puts Pontius Pilate in the outermost circle of Hell, among the indolent—scant punishment, you might think, for the man who executed Jesus Christ. By letting Pilate off easy, Dante was situating himself firmly on one side of a centuries-old debate: Who was more responsible for killing Christ,…

Julian Barnes has written important novels, from Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) to The Sense of an Ending (2011), as well as much nonfiction. Some of it has been great; some of it, inevitably, a bit less so. But all of it is the product of a subtle, searching, incisive, and witty mind, always riveting…

Site of the Yalta Conference, the Crimea is the Miami Beach of the former Soviet Union, a paradise of palm trees, health resorts, and other sybaritic pleasures. You might think this is the reason that Russia recently reconquered the province. But geopolitics and natural resources played a greater…

Historically, we’ve had witchcraft, priestcraft, warcraft, and occasionally a spot of statecraft. Today, we have craft beers in corner bars and craft talks at conclaves of writers around the country. Craft is mellowing with age.

For nearly six years now, a federal mandate has manhandled American colleges. The Department of Education's 2011 guidance on campus sexual misconduct reinterpreted a gender parity law—Title IX of the Higher Education Act—to police colleges' responses to reported sexual assaults. In so doing, the…

According to Rod Dreher, Western culture is irretrievably lost. No amount of politicking or resistance-as-usual can turn back the tide of intellectual currents that began with the death of metaphysical realism in the 14th century, the idea that "the essence of a thing is built into its existence by…

For nearly six years now, a federal mandate has manhandled American colleges. The Department of Education’s 2011 guidance on campus sexual misconduct reinterpreted a gender parity law—Title IX of the Higher Education Act—to police colleges' responses to reported sexual assaults. In so doing, the…

Thomas Hardy died in 1928 and immediately precipitated a most tangled crisis, namely, how and where to inter him. Hardy’s will specified that he wished to be buried in Stinsford churchyard in his native Dorset; but influential London literary friends pushed for a public ceremony and burial in the…

According to Rod Dreher, Western culture is irretrievably lost. No amount of politicking or resistance-as-usual can turn back the tide of intellectual currents that began with the death of metaphysical realism in the 14th century, the idea that “the essence of a thing is built into its existence by…

Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric—a guidebook of rhetorical devices—was an unexpected success in 2010. David R. Godine, the noted Boston publisher, had planned a print run of 4,000 copies, but sales shot to over 20,000 following glowing reviews in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. Ward…

In 1970, in a review of Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, John Russell, art critic of the New York Times, grandly prophesied that "the civilization that Clark describes is one which has had its day and will not be seen again." In acknowledging the learned brio with which Clark came to the defense of…

Tucked away somewhere in my dusty science writer’s memorabilia is a postcard I received in the early 1980s. On the front side is a picture of "Lucy"—hundreds of fossilized bones arrayed as the skeleton of a small primitive human ancestor. Lucy's remains were unearthed in Ethiopia's Afar region in…

With his latest book, Bing West has reconfirmed his standing as one of the most intrepid and insightful observers of America’s wars over the past decade-and-a-half. Some have called him a latter-day Ernie Pyle. Embedded for the sixth time with soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, West…

David Cannadine dedicates his biography of Margaret Thatcher: "In memory of Mrs T." But that Mrs T is not, as one might suppose, Mrs. Thatcher, the longest-serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century. Instead, the preface informs us, it is a Mrs. Thurman, the headmistress of…

David Cannadine dedicates his biography of Margaret Thatcher: “In memory of Mrs T." But that Mrs T is not, as one might suppose, Mrs. Thatcher, the longest-serving prime minister of Great Britain in the 20th century. Instead, the preface informs us, it is a Mrs. Thurman, the headmistress of…

In 1992, the exiled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide spoke to Jewish leaders in New York City. Having studied for three years in Jerusalem, he spoke to them in Hebrew as well as English. Aristide was slightly shocked to discover, after the talk, that he was not understood: Most of the…

This long-awaited critical edition of T. S. Eliot's poems is a scholarly milestone, a watershed in publishing history. The elaborate notes Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided for each line—indeed, each word—of each and every Eliot poem are so informative and the overviews for each stage…

Twenty-five years ago, I was a scrawny, short, flat-footed child with an irrepressible competitive streak. Sports, obviously, were out of the question. But fortunately for me, my school had a program called Academic Games. We'd play six competitive games against other schools on the local, state,…

"I don't believe in ghosts that come rattling to your bedside," says the Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson in this haunting new book. "Because truth is I live with one."

No, Chelsea Clinton's latest book is not a flop!

"I don't believe in ghosts that come rattling to your bedside," says the Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson in this haunting new book. "Because truth is I live with one."

Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed of genius, and the arch-journalist, poet, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874-1936) presided over this efflorescence of art and thought, knowing everything and everybody, making all the right friends and all the right enemies. From 1899…

Twenty-five years ago, I was a scrawny, short, flat-footed child with an irrepressible competitive streak. Sports, obviously, were out of the question. But fortunately for me, my school had a program called Academic Games. We’d play six competitive games against other schools on the local, state,…

Ralph Lerner is a man of rare learning, biting wit, and deep thought. His virtues are well known to generations of students and colleagues at the University of Chicago, although he is not as prominent in the wider world as he deserves to be. The publication of this book should induce many more…

A good many books are interesting, but far fewer are charming. That, however, is what Wear and Tear is. Tracy Tynan is the only child of the celebrated British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the wittiest 20th-century critic in any genre, and his American wife Elaine Dundy, author of the novel The Dud…

Adam Smith (1723-1790) may be the most misunderstood British thinker of the last 500 years—misunderstood not by intellectual historians but by journalists and the educated public. A case in point: Steven Pearlstein, a well-regarded business journalist, asserts that Smith argued that the…

'Beauty," Camille Paglia once wrote, "is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature." But as today's high-culture world descends into the morass of identity politics, beauty itself has surrendered to…

A good many books are interesting, but far fewer are charming. That, however, is what Wear and Tear is. Tracy Tynan is the only child of the celebrated British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the wittiest 20th-century critic in any genre, and his American wife Elaine Dundy, author of the novel The Dud…

‘Beauty," Camille Paglia once wrote, "is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature." But as today's high-culture world descends into the morass of identity politics, beauty itself has surrendered to…

Adam Smith (1723-1790) may be the most misunderstood British thinker of the last 500 years—misunderstood not by intellectual historians but by journalists and the educated public. A case in point: Steven Pearlstein, a well-regarded business journalist, asserts that Smith argued that the…

The author of this volume—a professor of Spanish and Portuguese studies at Northwestern—wrote it with provocative intent. But whether The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise will stimulate the academic and media debate he desires cannot be predicted. Darío Fernández-Morera's arguments are undermined by…

Ralph Lerner is a man of rare learning, biting wit, and deep thought. His virtues are well known to generations of students and colleagues at the University of Chicago, although he is not as prominent in the wider world as he deserves to be. The publication of this book should induce many more…

Eligible is one of more than a hundred reworkings of Pride and Prejudice listed on Goodreads and it’s part of a recent publishing enterprise, The Austen Project, which has paired six Austen novels with six contemporary novelists. (None of the four released so far has been a critical success.) When…

"An old pro told me that originality does not consist of saying what has never been said before; it consists of saying what you have to say that you know to be the truth."— Harvey Penick

In his concluding chapter, Owen Hatherley cites a passage from Alexander Herzen’s From the Other Shore (1851), which argued that ideals and aspirations, as they float around in our minds, don't tend to take the same shape when they metamorphose into the material world. Herzen, a political theorist…

Admit to being puzzled as to how to place this novel. Not how to evaluate its merits, for there are many. Lisa O’Donnell’s first novel, The Death of Bees, was the recipient of the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize; awarded by the Common-wealth Foundation for first novels, the prize “seeks to unearth,…

In The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), his study of English culture in the 18th century, John Brewer made a vital point when he argued that, although we might look back on the culture of the Georgians and see an enviable “order, stability and decorum," the Georgians themselves considered it…

What makes a meaningful life? It's an often strenuous, and in no way uniformly happy, existence compelled by service to some higher calling—higher, anyway, than selfish gratification. It's also an explainable life, simple enough to be told back to you as a story, but it keeps in touch with the…

Eric Rohmer was 50 when his mother died in 1970. They were in regular contact, and he often took his two sons from Paris to see her at her home in Tulle. But she went to her grave convinced that her eldest child was a classics teacher at a provincial lycée. She had no idea that he had been editor…

Eric Rohmer was 50 when his mother died in 1970. They were in regular contact, and he often took his two sons from Paris to see her at her home in Tulle. But she went to her grave convinced that her eldest child was a classics teacher at a provincial lycée. She had no idea that he had been editor…

Spend a few days in China, and you are bound to witness a stranger exposing his bare bottom on the subway or defecating on the sidewalk. While dismayed, you will find it easy to forgive these lewd acts: The perpetrators are generally under the age of 4. Following Chinese custom, their parents have…

The Ancient Greeks won the Cold War.

Outside the afternoon had already grown sunless and gray as we settled into our seats in eighth-grade English class. Our teacher, without preamble, carefully lowered the tone arm on a rackety portable record player. There was a scratchy pause, and then, unforgettably, we heard a low and sonorous,…

In this impressive intellectual biography of one of the founders of modern conservatism, Bradley Birzer makes the case for the importance of Russell Kirk (1918-94) today, in large part by making clear the extent to which Kirk’s philosophical but nonideological kind of conservatism differs from what…

After a presidential election year when the word "character" was bandied all over the place—often by people possessing very little of the commodity themselves—history may have something to teach us. So readers interested in a clear definition of character, and its importance as an essential element…

How do you write about a world you have never seen? It's a strange question for a writer of science fiction to ask, yet this was the spark that led a young Ursula K. Le Guin to Orsinia. Orsinia, "an unimportant country of middle Europe," was where, as a young writer in the early 1950s, she began to…

Fundamentally, the world of sensory experience is raw and ruthless. Chaos abounds, and events flow into one another without rhyme or reason. There are no clear beginnings or endings; no sense of triumph or despair. There is no Heaven or Hell. At its most innocent, the human mind is overwhelmed…

The last German offensive of World War II began at 5:30 a.m. on December 16, 1944. The rank-and-file German soldier thought he was giving Paris back to the Führer for a "Christmas present." The more experienced Wehrmacht commanders knew that, even should they reach the Meuse or—more…

It’s a commonplace observation, and yet somehow still a shocking one: In all of human civilization, no subject has been written and talked about more than the death of Jesus Christ. A typical subject you might study in graduate school—presidential politics, say, or the poetry of William…

After a presidential election year when the word “character" was bandied all over the place—often by people possessing very little of the commodity themselves—history may have something to teach us. So readers interested in a clear definition of character, and its importance as an essential element…

Fundamentally, the world of sensory experience is raw and ruthless. Chaos abounds, and events flow into one another without rhyme or reason. There are no clear beginnings or endings; no sense of triumph or despair. There is no Heaven or Hell. At its most innocent, the human mind is overwhelmed…

How do you write about a world you have never seen? It’s a strange question for a writer of science fiction to ask, yet this was the spark that led a young Ursula K. Le Guin to Orsinia. Orsinia, "an unimportant country of middle Europe," was where, as a young writer in the early 1950s, she began to…

Over seven decades, Helen Pinkerton has published a small number of poems admirable for their austere intellectual beauty, such as the newly collected "Metaphysical Song."

An essential job requirement for a government minister in a totalitarian dictatorship is a willingness to suffer endless humiliation at the hands of the supreme leader. Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) delivers a master class in the art of self-abasement, when subjected to the sadistic whims of Chairman…

Over seven decades, Helen Pinkerton has published a small number of poems admirable for their austere intellectual beauty, such as the newly collected “Metaphysical Song."

John O'Hara was wont to complain publicly about the state of his reputation, thereby joining the majority of writers, most of whom keep this standard complaint to themselves. What, exactly, apart from being insufficiently grand to please him, was his reputation?

In its Great Battles series, Oxford University Press has published studies of Waterloo, Gallipoli, Alamein, Agincourt, and Hattin—the battle Saladin won that enabled him to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The latest entry in this series focuses on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on…

John O'Hara was wont to complain publicly about the state of his reputation, thereby joining the majority of writers, most of whom keep this standard complaint to themselves. What, exactly, apart from being insufficiently grand to please him, was his reputation?

In his early twenties, David Hume (1711-1776), who is regarded by many observers as Britain’s greatest philosopher, studied law and worked briefly for a Bristol merchant, but he soon decided he wanted to be a man of letters. Instead of moving to London and becoming a journalist—the usual path for…

In its Great Battles series, Oxford University Press has published studies of Waterloo, Gallipoli, Alamein, Agincourt, and Hattin—the battle Saladin won that enabled him to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The latest entry in this series focuses on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on…

The religious detective, dating back at least to the early 20th century with Melville Davisson Post's Protestant layman Uncle Abner and G. K. Chesterton's Roman Catholic priest Father Brown, has continued to occupy a distinguished (and often lucrative) niche in the world of fictional sleuthing.

The religious detective, dating back at least to the early 20th century with Melville Davisson Post’s Protestant layman Uncle Abner and G. K. Chesterton's Roman Catholic priest Father Brown, has continued to occupy a distinguished (and often lucrative) niche in the world of fictional sleuthing.

Impresario of his father’s legacy, Christopher Rothko plays Vasari to papa Mark (1903-1970). Simultaneously pious and market-driven, his apotheosis of the painter is two things at once. Elegantly packaged, it is a promotional tool for sustaining his father's cult status and attendant asset value.…

A good historian is inevitably a revisionist. Why write if you have nothing new to offer? But of course, not all revisionists are good historians. Whole forests have been cut down in the name of publishing some novel insight that obscures the past rather than enlightens. John Bew, a professor in…

Supersleuths in the mode of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Hercule Poirot are an endangered species. With scattered exceptions, the Great Detective has fallen out of fashion in favor of mere smart people—driven cops, dogged private eyes, curious amateurs—without special deductive powers.

Conservatives are reptiles. This is the message that progressive talking heads and Democratic campaign consultants heave at America’s impressionable swing voters: Conservatives are cold, lethargic, calculating creatures who peer out at the world through diamond pupils in swampy green eyes, and who…

Wilkie Collins was quite literally a colorful character. His doctor described his attire at dinner as sometimes featuring “a light camel hair or tweed suit, with a broad pink or blue striped shirt, and perhaps a red tie." On another occasion he appeared wearing a low-cut shirt "dashed with great,…

No history cries out for revision more insistently than Irish history. And no event in Irish history demonstrates this better than the Easter Rebellion—the centennial of which is now in full throttle—because no event better epitomizes the vexed question of what constitutes Irish identity and Irish…

This past summer, as I sat in a movie theater about to watch Girl Shy (1924), a nine-decade-old comedy starring Harold Lloyd, I wondered what the uninitiated audience would think. This was a silent movie, and it isn’t easy to trade spoken dialogue for pantomime. And then there was the star of the…

On the third page of We Are Not Ourselves, it is said that Big Mike lives in an apartment on whose walls the only piece of art is a painting of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. If not a friend to the world of fine art, Mike is a great friend to his fellow Irish immigrants in Woodside,…

In many ways, for those who dislike the apologetics of C. S. Lewis and/or the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams (1886-1945) is the most approachable of the Inklings. He was more connected to the ideas and people of the present moment than were Lewis, who never read newspapers and called…

If a cultured American is one who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger, then an educated Briton is someone who gets the jokes in 1066 and All That, W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s 1930 pastiche of patriotic legends and schoolroom clichés. In that loving spoof,…

No one will be surprised by the general theme of this book: the enduring tension between the federal and state governments, between the center and the periphery of the American political system. Not unique to the United States, the distinctiveness of the pull between central and other American…

The historian Jeffrey Herf's profound new book shows that German-animated left-wing terrorism targeting Israel was not a tactic but rather part of a long-war strategy to destroy the Jewish state. Academic study and journalism on the now-defunct East German Communist state and radical West German…

There is an old saw that the English and the Americans are two peoples divided by a common language. While there is a certain element of humor in this, there was more than an element of truth in it during the war years (1942-45) in the European Theater. Niall Barr highlights this and other…

Noam Chomsky would seem an irresistible figure for lampooning by Tom Wolfe, whose career has been devoted to eviscerating the preening of America's bien pensant class. Since the Vietnam war, when he looked like nothing less than Dennis the Menace's father, Chomsky has been the very model of…

David Wootton has written a long book to save science from something, even if he’s not quite sure what that something is. The demystification, deconstruction, and doubt of post-modernity, maybe. Or revitalized religious faith, from Radical Islam to Protestant Fundamentalism. Certainly, Wootton…

Noam Chomsky would seem an irresistible figure for lampooning by Tom Wolfe, whose career has been devoted to eviscerating the preening of America’s bien pensant class. Since the Vietnam war, when he looked like nothing less than Dennis the Menace's father, Chomsky has been the very model of…

The rise and fall of Lyndon B. Johnson from 1963 to 1968 is now recalled as a cautionary tale in the history of postwar America, illustrating at once the possibilities and perils of bold presidential leadership. Few presidents have achieved the popularity and electoral success Johnson enjoyed in…

Taste—to paraphrase a good line from a bad writer—is the hobgoblin of little minds. At least, that's the general view today. People who complain about sagging jeans, low-cut blouses, and high-cut skirts are either laughably old-fashioned or offensively narrow-minded. Those who take exception to…

“If you think you can stop me," Edison said softly, "go ahead and try. But you'll have to do it in the dark."

Many readers will doubtless be familiar with some of the tales of intimidation told in Kimberly Strassel's The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech. Strassel's great accomplishment is to bring them all together in one place. She identifies a national phenomenon and fleshes it…

On July 30, 1914, as war was beginning to be declared throughout Europe, Edith Wharton stood in the glow of Chartres Cathedral. Wharton’s collected writings about her travels to the front in World War I, originally published in 1915, begin with her visit to the medieval cathedral. She describes…

The first time I fell victim to a prop bet (not to be confused with the sports bet) was in New Orleans in 2000. I was on spring break with some fellow greenhorns from my Jesuit high school. We were weaving through the French Quarter, loaded on Hand Grenades and freedom, wearing bull’s-eyes on our…

In February, Israeli archaeologists uncovered the well-preserved remains of two Copper Age houses in northern Jerusalem, the oldest such discovery in the vicinity. "The fascinating flint finds attest to the livelihood of the local population in prehistoric times," said Ronit Lupo, the Israeli…

Many of our finest poets—think of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—are also known as major critics, but in Susan Howe's case, it has always been difficult to separate the two practices. My Emily Dickinson (1985), the book that first brought Howe wide attention, is at once revisionary scholarship, careful…

I've been waiting for a book like this for a while now.

Charles J. Sykes's latest indictment of higher education, Fail U., in stores Tuesday, comes at what's widely considered a low point for the American college. "Brainwashed Bernie fanatics," and a "crisis-level plague of indecency" have gripped campuses, reflected Rick Santorum in the minutes leading…

People in the United States are experiencing a level of political discontent unseen in decades. Partisans on the right have long fought against the inexorable growth of big government, just as those on the left have always railed against the growing power of big business. This year, the sides have…

It was the summer of 1832, and the two great Whig senators, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, had come across a brilliant plan to embarrass and damage the Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, just before the election. The Second Bank of the United States, hated by agrarians and Jacksonians, but much…

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is remembered by most people only as a name—the name of the woman who shot Andy Warhol. On the day of the shooting, June 3, 1968, Warhol was at the pinnacle of his fame, first as a pop artist, and then, as the 1960s progressed, a cinematic auteur. Warhol’s innumerable…

What’s it like to be in the heart of a jihadist? He called her his "baby." Each morning she awoke to a string of missed Skype calls asking where she was. They talked for hours each night. "He" was Abu Bilel, the French right-hand man of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and she was an undercover reporter he…

It is an ordinary summer day in northern Syria, in 2013. No barrel bombs filled with shrapnel that indiscriminately kill all living things; just a few artillery shells that no one pays much attention to. Suddenly a bomb hits close to a house where members of the Free Syrian Army are drinking tea.…

More often than not, a writer of history has to choose either to entertain the masses or to fill a hole in some subject's scholarly literature. George Goodwin's new Benjamin Franklin in London has the dust jacket of the former but the minute detail of the latter. It is not a book to be entered into…

In House of Lost Worlds, Richard Conniff fills an instructive gap in the story of how and why American museums were invented. The creation of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History is a tale encompassing all three subjects of the subtitle, with the most delicious being the drag-down drama of how…

Everyone except the most rigid secularists would agree that the Bible has been the most influential book in American history. The American Bible Society (ABS), founded in 1816, has been the most important agency in putting Bibles into Americans’ hands. Tracking the number of Bibles the ABS has…

When John F. Kennedy addressed the Canadian parliament in 1961, he depicted relations between the two nations in beautiful prose: “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined…

Everything has a history and a pre-history, and that includes Donald Trump and his angry hordes. Trump is by no means the first American tycoon to stir up fears and resentments and attempt to ride a populist wave. One of his notable predecessors, mostly forgotten today, is Robert Welch.

Der Spiegel recently described the great German writers Thomas and Heinrich Mann and their progeny thus: “egocentric and self-deprecating, half-bound to one another, sexually irregular, the representatives of a different Germany. .  .  . [Today] Thomas Mann's family seems astonishingly modern." No…

A book about a statesman by a politician prompts two questions: Do we learn anything new about the statesman, and do we learn anything useful about the politician? In this case, the answer to both questions is yes.