A Review of Sustaining Democracy
Are calls for civility unrealistic and naïve, or requisite for a sustainable democracy?
Book Reviews
Fresh commentary on some of the most important books in law, politics, and culture.
A Review of How Antitrust Failed Workers
Eric Posner believes antitrust needs radical reformation to address businesses' monopsony power over labor.
A Review of Universal Economics
Universal Economics reads like a cross between a classical economics textbook and a Malcolm Gladwell book.
A Review of The Profession
The Profession is a fascinating and colorful account of law-enforcement leadership and the vision that American policing sorely needs today.
Past Reviews
A Review of Free as a Jew
Wisse's book is dedicated to her students—and theirs—in the hope that they will retrieve the precious freedoms that are being lost.
A Review of Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation
Asimov judges the present by an imagined future, acting on the belief that scientific procedures guarantee progress.
A Review of Heaven Can Indeed Fall
Is Willmoore Kendall's private life necessary to understand his public thought?
A Review of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit
Uncertainty remains a key idea to understanding enterprise, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.
A Review of America Against America
Does Wang Huning know America better than Americans themselves?
A Review of Mozart: The Reign of Love
Mozart tended to focus on what was universal in human experience—the world, its order, its beauty.
A Review of Crossroads
Jonathan Franzen’s welcome engagement with religion is undercut by his reductive psychological account.
A Review of The Deep Places
Ross Douthat's harrowing memoir reminds us that Lyme is one of those diseases that our health care system handles quite badly.
A Review of Soul City
The lessons of self-help and self-responsibility that Floyd McKissick preached are increasingly rare in today's society.
A Review of Just War and Ordered Liberty
War is a profoundly imperfect, inefficient, and iniquitous element of the human experience, one that corrupts everything it touches.
A Review of When France Fell
The fall of France in 1940 was America’s biggest foreign policy miscalculation in the twentieth century.
A Review of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts
Is the obsessive focus on material gain among all classes of Americans self-destructive?
A Review of Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free
The incarceration of criminals, the death penalty, and detention of accused terrorists are misplaced targets of Judge Jed Rakoff's ire.
A Review of Sin
This treatment of sin lacks an inner logic or rationale, a guiding conception of what philosophy is and how it operates.