Book Reviews

End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers (Gord Magill)

A few months ago, I showed our young children 1977’s “Smokey and the Bandit.” As with so many movies that are more than twenty years old, watching it is like stepping into a different,...

Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History (Alexander Rose)

Cicero described Julius Caesar as a man “of supreme daring, hardened to every risk.” In our hyper-feminized age, such men seem nonexistent, though more likely they are quietly biding their time, and will emerge...

Tom Wedderburn’s Life (Theodore Judson)

In the perhaps-unfortunate words of the Declaration of Independence, men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The words are unfortunate,...

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Tim Wu)

Tim Wu is the Jeremiah of our age. For twenty years, his has been one of the very few nuanced voices attacking concentrations of economic power as destructive of a flourishing society. Yes, others...

On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (Bertrand de Jouvenel)

For years, I put off reading On Power, despite seeing frequent references to it. The book seemed, as filtered through online discourse (my first mistake), to be merely another tedious libertarian manifesto. Moreover, dimwits...

The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order (Philip Pilkington)

We all want to know comes next, because we sense that it will be very different from what came before. This is a book not so much about our uncertain future, but about why...

Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families (Johann Kurtz)

The Great Commission of the modern age is not to bring the Gospel to all nations. It is to CONSOOM! Thus, a man’s perceived success in life is determined mostly by how many resources...

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Paul Kingsnorth)

In the Book of Daniel, the prophet interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of an awesome statue. It boasts a golden head and silver body, but it has feet of iron mixed with clay. And when those...

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (Sebastian Junger)

I am not sure how often most people think about death. For myself, I think about my death several dozen times per day. This is not a morbid fixation, merely focused self-interest combined with...

Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World (Richard Middleton)

To the extent most people ever think about Charles, Earl Cornwallis, they think of him as portrayed in Mel Gibson’s film The Patriot. There he is an aged, somewhat hapless, conflicted military officer, ultimately...