A Review of Deaths of Despair
Deaths of despair are related to questions of meaning and the psychological conditions for social malaise.
Book Reviews
Fresh commentary on some of the most important books in law, politics, and culture.
A Review of How to Be a Dictator
Dictators used sycophantic biographers, influential artists, and press agents to spread their cults and create the illusion of invincibility.
A Review of Athens and Jerusalem
No polity, whether Israel or America, will be healthy if it blurs together God and nation.
A Review of The First
Fish contends that free speech as a concept must be “flexible” and “malleable” in order to allow for its application in a variety of real-world situations.
Past Reviews
A Review of The Radio Right
Right-wing radio broadcasters were a crucial, but now mostly forgotten, element of the Republican Party’s rise in the South.
A Review of Irrationality
Irrationality offers all manner of human peculiarities and follies but no clarity on the exact attributes making something irrational.
A Review of Union
What happens when an author writes brilliantly but seems utterly unaware of his prejudices?
A Review of Love in the Ruins
In 2020, a famous novelist offering a tale about love in the midst of disaster is a prophet of hope
A Review of Lost in Thought
The liberal arts are valuable only insofar as they are transformative, redemptive, and central to human flourishing.
A Review of Lost in Thought
Hitz reminds us of a way out of the dark woods we find ourselves in, a journey that draws us upwards and out of our isolated selves.
A Review of Lost in Thought
The life of the mind needs firm anchors lest it become unmoored from reason and prudence.
A Review of How America's Political Parties Change
How America's Political Parties Change represents the culmination of Michael Barone’s 60 years of experience examining American elections.
A Review of Charisma and Disenchantment
Vocation’s lost meaning is the real mystery.
A Review of Capital and Ideology
For Piketty, the Hayekian turn in the 1980s was a long planned ideological triumph, but his narrative omits certain crucial details.
A Review of Thomas Jefferson's Lives
Jefferson remains indispensable to the American story, the wordsmith of our most noble ideals and symbol of our most awful paradoxes.
A Review of The Dubious Morality of Administrative Law
The difficulty is that APA originalism runs up against the constitutionalist position at every turn.
A Review of America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding
Reilly not only vindicates the founders, he provides arguments that are so strong that a competent grand jury would not even allow the case to go to trial.
A Review of In Search of the Soul
Even with (literally) a lifetime of experience under our belts, human beings are not fully transparent—even to ourselves.