“Lest I should have appeared overly critical, allow me to restate that even in this, her analysis is exceptional and that overall, George Orwell and Russia is a uniquely penetrating study of Eric Blair’s life and legacy.”
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Tag: book review
By the Known Rules of Ancient Liberty: A Review of Masha Karp’s “George Orwell and Russia”
People over Place: Reviewing “The Culture Transplant” by Garett Jones
“Any serious government would, therefore, develop and implement immigration policy with the utmost care. Instead, our governments are experimenting with unprecedented peacetime increases in immigration that further expand ethnic and cultural diversity.”
Review: “A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation” by Antón Barba-Kay
“Barba-Kay’s central claim is that digital technology is categorically different from prior technologies. It is not just a matter of degree but, rather, a matter of kind.”
Grappling with Liberalism
“Modern liberalism, equally, cannot go on as it is at the moment, veering toward destruction, becoming ever more decrepit and ineffectual, incapable of meeting the challenges—domestic, geopolitical, planetary—of the 21st century.”
The True Origin of Palestinian Suffering Was Not 1948
“However, there was one man who positioned himself very early on as an opponent to this growing Jewish presence in his homeland. This man was Haj Amin al-Husseini, who, in 1921, became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.”
Review: “In Defense of Civilization” by Michael R. J. Bonner
“Bonner has done a great service in reminding us what true civilization means, the cost of losing it, and how we can regain it.”
Incurious: George and the Postcolonialists
“Schwartz-DuPre is dedicated to putting an end to the idea that Curious George is nothing more than an amusing story.”
Confessions of a Beautiful Soul
“Despite the book’s homage to Friedrich Schiller via its title, we get nothing even remotely reminiscent of the profound intellectual mind meld between him and his great friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.”
Review: “Crassus: The First Tycoon” by Peter Stothard
“Now, Peter Stothard has given us the final decades of the republic through the eyes of Crassus—Rome’s wealthiest man and former consul who famously embarked on a vainglorious and ultimately failed conquest of Parthia that culminated in his embarrassing death.”
Review: “Uncommon Wrath” by Josiah Osgood
“[Josiah] Osgood’s book is a welcome and exciting read about the rivalry between Caesar and Cato; Cato, in the process, finally receives some much-deserved due in the story of the republic’s final decades.”
On Literary Science and the Bounds of Knowledge
“But philistinism is not limited to the arts. I believe that those who cannot appreciate the wondrous beauty of the real world as revealed by science are philistines, too.”
Review: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left” by Matt Johnson
“[Matt] Johnson believes that by adopting [Christopher] Hitchens’s approach—his allergy to party politics, his hatred of racism and nationalism, his emphasis on pluralism and humanism—the contemporary left will not just benefit at the ballot box but will also benefit morally and intellectually.”
Review: “The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective” by Michael Walzer
“Reading between the lines, we learn in fact that [Michael] Walzer believes that the Right, wrong in its continuing adherence to capitalism, but correct in its eschewal of intellectual fashion, currently has a monopoly on political wisdom.”
Review: Spencer Klavan’s “How To Save The West”
“Being a classicist and student of Greek philosophy, Klavan turns to his education to solve these philosophical dilemmas.”
Review: Waller Newell’s “Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger”
“Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proceeding through the luminaries of German Idealism and Romanticism—climaxing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—then marching beyond Hegel to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, Newell gives a reading of philosophy gone wrong. Horribly wrong.”
