Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Paul Kingsnorth)

In the Book of Daniel, the prophet interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of an awesome statue. It boasts a golden head and silver body, but it has feet of iron mixed with clay. And when those...

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (Sebastian Junger)

I am not sure how often most people think about death. For myself, I think about my death several dozen times per day. This is not a morbid fixation, merely focused self-interest combined with...

Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World (Richard Middleton)

To the extent most people ever think about Charles, Earl Cornwallis, they think of him as portrayed in Mel Gibson’s film The Patriot. There he is an aged, somewhat hapless, conflicted military officer, ultimately...

The Essential Paul Gottfried: Essays from 1984–2024 (Paul Gottfried)

Paul Gottfried is a great man, and you should read this book. He has spent decades offering a consistent political message, paleoconservatism, a name he coined. Of itself, his philosophy would certainly be of...

On the United Kingdom, and 1989 Eastern Europe as Harbinger

As the cliché goes, history does not repeat, but it does rhyme. Thirty-five years ago the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed overnight, something that nobody in the West had foreseen. It turned out,...

Stoner (John Williams)

When I was very young, my mother told me that the chief value of good fiction is it allows the reader to better understand other men and women. Even so, I have never read...

A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague (Judith M. Bennett)

History is the story of what resulted from the acts of great men, directly and indirectly, buffeted by fortune. Thus, in the Middle Ages, as in every age, what the common people did in...

Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail (Stephen Taylor)

Among the first books I read, when around five years of age, were some written by my great uncle, Charles Frye Haywood, after whom I am named. He was a lawyer in Lynn, Massachusetts,...

John Chrysostom on the Roman Empire: A Study on the Political Thought of the Early Church (Constantine Bozinis)

In late modernity a strange delusion has taken hold among many Christians. They have come to believe that democracy, broad popular participation in how a society is governed, is a morally superior political system,...

Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1842–1855 (Richard Mowbray Haywood)

The history of nineteenth-century Russia does not get much attention in the West, and what little it does get usually focuses on people and events seen as precursors to Russia’s chaotic later history. As...

Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America (Jim Rasenberger)

Every so often, some cretin threatens me on X, formerly known as Twitter. These soyboy types tend to lead by saying I appear weak and fragile. I doubt I would lose a physical fight,...

The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (Jonathan Phillips)

In the classic 1970s Irish Republican Army anthem “My Little Armalite,” the lyrics include “Well the army came to visit me, ’twas in the early hours / With Saladins and Saracens and Ferret armored...

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Christopher Lasch)

It is common knowledge that the vast majority of sociology is completely worthless, or worse than worthless, and that “social science” is an oxymoron. Still, the study of the societies of man can be...

The Ancient City (Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges)

Two things about the past are simultaneously true. First, that men and women of history, even distant history, were not, in their essence, different from us. The nature of man does not change. Second,...

Against Gross Domestic Product

If twenty-first-century America has an idol, a graven image we collectively worship, it is Gross Domestic Product. All discussion about the flourishing of our nation is reduced to GDP, and its increase seen as...

Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief (Ronald Hutton)

Most know about the English Civil War, and that it ended with the execution of Charles I, in 1649. But this is not really true. That war, the First English Civil War, which alone...

The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Carl Schmitt)

In this challenging book, Carl Schmitt analyzes the modern state through the life and death of the Leviathan state of Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, the “mortal god,” dominated the early modern era, but contained within...

The Martian General’s Daughter (Theodore Judson)

What is America? This may seem like a strange question to ask after reading a book titled The Martian General’s Daughter. But it is the most important question that we who live in the...
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All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

– T. E. Lawrence

As with most of my book reviews, I am not actually reviewing this book, at least in the traditional sense. Rather, I am delivering my own thoughts. If you don’t like that, well, you’re in the wrong place.

– Charles Haywood

I’m not in the apologies business. I’m in the winning business.

– Charles Haywood

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Live not by lies. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tell me who your enemy is and I will tell you who you are. — Carl Schmitt
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty. — Thomas Paine
Some have the speed, and the right combinations / If you can't take the punches, it don't mean a thing. — Warren Zevon
Naglfar, the ship of the apocalypse, shifts into a calculable position. — Ernst Jünger
A little less conversation, a little more action, please / All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me . — Elvis Presley
Timing is all. — Vladimir Lenin