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Monthly Archives: August, 2017

The Once and Future Liberal (Mark Lilla)

Mark Lilla has been a bad, bad boy.  He has dared to point out the feet of clay upon which stand King Liberal, and...

The CEO Pay Machine (Steven Clifford)

I’ve been complaining about the topic of this book for at least fifteen years.  Actually, my basic complaint has been broader—that almost all CEOs...

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Richard Rothstein)

Some years ago, I lived for a time in Oak Park, Illinois.  Oak Park has for decades been filled with rich white liberals, who...

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (James C. Scott)

This outstanding book, by the anarchist-tending academic James C. Scott, might be (but isn’t) subtitled “Barbarians Are Happier, Fatter and Better Looking.”  The author...

On Rebellion

American history is full of rebellion—the War of Independence and the Civil War, of course, but also unsuccessful smaller-scale rebellions—Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion,...

Captain Blood (Rafael Sabatini)

Captain Blood, to the extent it is mentioned today, is remembered as a 1935 movie that made the career of Errol Flynn.  The story...

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Tony Judt)

Postwar, by the late Tony Judt, is the type of book for which the term “magisterial” might have been invented.  Judt takes an enormous...

At the Edge of the World: The Heroic Century of the French Foreign Legion (Jean-Vincent Blanchard)

Everyone knows about the French Foreign Legion.  Mostly, though, our knowledge ranges from impressionistic to false, derived largely from movies and with an overlay...