Home2017April

Monthly Archives: April, 2017

How We Got To Now (Steven Johnson)

How We Got To Now is competent enough, but it feels threadbare.  It feels like a narrative designed to punctuate a picture show that...

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (Tyler Cowen)

Tyler Cowen is a popular economist, known for an influential blog (Marginal Revolution) and a set of books on economics directed at a general...

Age of Anger: A History of the Present (Pankaj Mishra)

Twenty years ago, that liberal Baal, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, assigned me to read The Golden Bowl, by Henry James.  She said it was the...

The Abolition of Britain (Peter Hitchens)

I did not like this book as much as I expected.  In part that’s because, as an American, a narrative of British decline resonates...

The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 (Lionel Shriver)

I’m a sucker for apocalyptic fiction.  Probably, similar to many doom-and-gloom conservatives, deep down I see myself as bestriding the Apocalypse like a colossus,...

The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age (James Kirchick)

This is a silly and shallow book.  But it is not worthless, because it serves to exemplify and clarify modern political fracture lines.  In...