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Monthly Archives: January, 2017

Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (Anne Mendelson)

I hate milk. I find many of the recipes in this book frankly loathsome, were I to try them, which I won’t. On the...

The Worm Ouroboros (Eric Rücker Eddison)

This is a strange book.  It has always been a strange book, even when first published in 1922.  But it’s a very satisfying strange...

The Demon In Democracy (Ryszard Legutko)

There is a scene in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, in which a character comes across a book of philosophy (Schopenhauer) and realizes in a soaring...

On The Growth In Political Intolerance; Or, The Days of Rage

As we all know, one of the results of the rise of social media is that people are able to communicate their political views...

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Roger Scruton)

It is easy enough to know what the Right thinks, and why.  Half a dozen recent books can easily be found explaining clearly libertarianism;...

On the Trail of Inca Gold (Hector Lazo)

Every American generation has its young adult fiction, and we can all agree it tends to reflect the society of its time.  We associate...

Conquests and Cultures (Thomas Sowell)

Last month, in December 2016, maybe as a Christmas gift to himself, Thomas Sowell announced that he was retiring.  Technically, he announced that he...

The Attention Merchants (Tim Wu)

Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants is part history and part social analysis. The history related in The Attention Merchants tells us something we all...

Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution (Toby Huff)

Toby Huff’s Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution is in many ways a companion book to his earlier The Rise of Early Modern Science....

The Final Day (William Fortschen)

I did not have high hopes for this book. But I was wrong—this is an outstanding book. It’s way better than the middle book...

Charlemagne (Johannes Fried)

“Charlemagne” is a rare sort of work—a satisfying biography about a historical figure about whom very little is directly known.  The usual result from...

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Peter Frankopan)

The East, what in a more direct and confident time we called the Orient, has always held a deep fascination for a certain subset...