Category: Book reviews
The Audacity of Clothes: How Michelle Obama’s Fashion Choices Changed the World
Barack and Michelle Obama have been criticized for trading their activist roots for a post-presidency focused on celebrity networking and voracious wealth accumulation. In an effort to dismiss her critics, Michelle has published a $50 coffee table book about fashion.
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Cold War Interlude
Is there a more purely entertaining British novelist writing today than William Boyd? I doubt it, and I would even go a step further than that. Since his crowning achievement with 2002’s whole-life novel Any Human Heart, Boyd has pivoted from the witty, Evelyn Waugh-ish literary books with which he began his career to a series of period-set spy novels that focus on what it’s like to be an innocent caught up in events beyond their comprehension. From 2006’s mega-bestseller Restless to 2012’s Waiting for Sunrise, Boyd has consistently proved himself the purveyor of high-class, page-turning espionage fiction. Warmer and funnier than le Carré, less jaded than Mick Herron, his novels are page-turners par excellence.
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Giving History the Human Touch
America owes all her triumphs to the humans who crawled across battlefields, toiled in factories, blasted through mountains, sermonized on soapboxes, and experimented in labs. American history—world history—is human history more than anything. The late David McCullough understood this as well as anyone, and in the posthumous collection of his essays and speeches, History Matters, this basic idea is a consistent throughline.
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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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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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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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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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