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Monthly Archives: August, 2019

Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (James Stevens Curl)

High architecture, that of grand buildings, is a bridge between God and man, and a sinew binding state and people, the ruling class and...

American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm (Thomas P. Hughes)

American Genesis is a cultural history of the grand century of American technology, from 1870 to 1970. Thomas Hughes published his book in 1989,...

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (James Fitzjames Stephen)

Among the many idols of our age, there is one that rules them all: John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, the belief that an individual’s...

Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (Robert Irwin)

I generally liked this book, by the erudite Orientalist Robert Irwin, but I am not sure why it exists. It is too academic to...

Invisible Planets (Hannu Rajaniemi)

I have always loathed the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Bleak, unhappy, and cold, they depressed me as a child, and I’m not...

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi)

This book, a massive study by two Israeli historians, aspires to answer why and how Turkey exterminated its Christian population in the thirty years...