Category: Book reviews
Putting Atheism on the Defensive
Academic pariah he may be, but on the big questions Charles Murray is a man of his time. Science, he believed for most of his life, had demolished the traditional notion of God. Consciousness is produced by the brain, nothing more. The Gospels are less history than folklore.
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Karp’s Quest to Save the Shire
“You’re killing my family in Palestine!” a protester screamed at Palantir CEO Alex Karp while he was addressing a Silicon Valley conference last April. “The primary source of death in Palestine,” Karp, the Jewish, half-black, progressive, tai chi practitioner shot back, without missing a beat, “is the fact that Hamas has realized there are millions and millions of useful idiots.”
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In the Mind of McNamara
One of the few aspects of the Vietnam war about which most historians agree is that Robert McNamara horribly mismanaged it as secretary of defense. There is no agreement, however, on how McNamara did the nation such a disservice. For those who view American intervention in Vietnam as unnecessary and inherently futile, McNamara is condemned for getting the United States into the war and then for refusing to get it out once he himself became disillusioned. For those who view the intervention as a noble cause that could have ended victoriously, McNamara’s principal failing was his imposition of severe restraints on the military.
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Courage Under Fire
First came the water pouring down the slopes of Japan’s Mount Fuji on October 19, 1979. Then on top of the torrents came the fire that killed 13 U.S. Marines and burned dozens more. Though investigators afterward may not have consulted the Bible, they ended up attributing the unusual mix of elements involved to the same force that, per the Book of Exodus, enveloped ancient Egypt in hail and fire. “It was an act of God,” investigators concluded.
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The Sacred and Profane Decade
One of the stranger moments in the history of American popular music occurred in the winter of 1986, when the chorus of the hottest song on the pop charts featured Greek lyrics from a Christian prayer. Teenagers speeding with their friends rolled down their windows, let the wind blow their Aqua Netted hair, and yelled, “Kyrie Eleison”—Lord have mercy—“down the road that I must travel!” At keg parties in fraternities and sororities across the land, college students sang, in the native language of their social organizations, “Lord have mercy through the darkness of the night.” And while it’s true that many of the song’s fans probably thought they were singing “carry a laser,” Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie Eleison” topped the Billboard 100 for two consecutive weeks. As Tom Breihan describes it, the hit pop song is “a textbook example of ambiguous worship music.”
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McCloskey’s Latest Spy Thriller Turns a New Page
In just five years, David McCloskey has gone from being a complete unknown to his current status as one of our leading writers of spy fiction, a remarkably rapid ascent. While his first three novels—Damascus Station (2021), Moscow X (2023), and The Seventh Floor (2024)—were set in the same fictional universe, centered around the CIA (where McCloskey himself spent seven or eight years as an analyst, mostly in the Middle East), The Persian marks a new departure.
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A Book So Bad It Shattered Liberals’ Faith in DEI
Karine Jean-Pierre can’t stop making history. Earlier this year, the former White House press secretary became the highest-ranking openly queer, French-born black woman with a hyphenated surname to publicly renounce the Democratic Party for being mean to Joe Biden. She is the only black female lesbian immigrant to publish a book about her time in the Biden administration. It is the worst political memoir ever written in the history of the English language.
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C.P. Cavafy: Cosmopolitan Poet
Early in their biography of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys announce that they have written a “thematic” as opposed to a “linear” biography. The facts of their subject’s life, they hold, are rather unremarkable and straightforward. “We have chosen, therefore, to start and finish his life story with his
The Constitutional Commentary We Need
There’s a familiar lament among constitutionalists—one heard at law schools, in courtrooms, and across think tank hallways—that most Americans know next to nothing about the nation’s founding document. Ask a random college graduate about the Emoluments Clause or the Compact Clause and you’ll get a blank stare. Yet even among lawyers and judges, constitutional knowledge
