Monthly Archives: January, 2018
The Middle Ages (Johannes Fried)
It is universally accepted today that the Dark Ages are a myth, roughly as believable as the Australian bunyip. In fact, medieval Europe was...
The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (Niall Ferguson)
This book, by the always fascinating Niall Ferguson (though his main product for sale is always himself), analyzes capsule summaries of episodes from history,...
The Collapse of Complex Societies (Joseph A. Tainter)
In the middle part of the twentieth century, before The Walking Dead, the historiography of civilizational collapse was dominated by Arnold Toynbee’s multi-volume A...
The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America’s Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era (Clyde Prestowitz)
For decades, “free trade” has been the American orthodoxy across the mainstream of both Left and Right. Some recent erosion has occurred, though, with...
Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (Christopher Caldwell)
This book, published in 2009, shows its age. It was written before the mass immigration to Europe of the past few years, and also...
The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (Mark Lilla)
Mark Lilla’s books are all polished gems, perfectly and fluidly written, brief yet complete within the ambit Lilla sets for each of his works. ...
Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall (Anna Funder)
The wicked reality of Communism has, over the past twenty-five years, been deliberately erased from Western education and, more broadly, from the Western mind. ...
Age of Fracture (Daniel T. Rodgers)
When I first started reading this book, which I pulled more or less at random off my shelf, I was a little mystified why...