Review by Brian Tanguay In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman sounded a warning about media ownership and the danger to the public when it’s fed a…
Category: Nonfiction
To Hell with It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno by Dinty W. Moore
Review by George Yatchisin If you’ve even wondered why the hell we came up with hell, this is the book for you. Dinty W. Moore knows of hell well, and…
To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change by Alfred W. McCoy
Review by Brian Tanguay What factors contribute to the rise and fall of empires, and what characteristics distinguish an empire from a world order? In To Govern the Globe, American…
Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy by Nathaniel Philbrick
Review by David Starkey Nathaniel Philbrick’s greatest successes as an author have come revisiting America’s Revolutionary War-period, where he has explored events like Bunker Hill, Washington’s victory at Yorktown, and…
A Field Guide to White Supremacy Kathleen Belew and Ramon Gutierrez, Editors
Review by Brian Tanguay When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, there was a perception that the United States had crossed a line and put the worst excesses of…
On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
Review by David Starkey While Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth is, in part, about the new national holiday inspired by the events of June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, when Major…
Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas
Review by Brian Tanguay At one time or another most of us have suffered at the hands of a petty tyrant, perhaps an overbearing supervisor at work, a rude clerk…
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter
Review by Brian Tanguay In the Human Stain, the late Philip Roth’s award-winning novel published in 2000, an academic named Coleman Silk has his life, career and reputation derailed for…
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
Review by Brian Tanguay Warfare is one of the oldest practices in human history, one that creates and destroys empires, topples or installs kings and dictators, and inflicts suffering on…
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder; Illustrated by Nora Krug
Review by David Starkey Crown published Timothy Snyder’s original, text-only version of On Tyranny in February of 2017, a little more than a month after Donald Trump took office. The…