A Wolf Eat Wolf World
Religious beheadings are back in fashion, and not just in the Middle East. If you stroll down to the Winter Garden Theater on 51st and Broadway in New York, you can see six of them in one evening at...
View ArticleRoyals and Regalia
On one cold day in New Jersey, I met a king. His Royal Majesty Benjamin Ikenchuku Keaboreku I, the Dein of Nigeria’s Agbor Kingdom, had come to see Royals and Regalia, a new exhibit at the Newark...
View ArticleBlues Upside Your Head
Muddy Waters: The Complete Aristocrat and Chess Singles As & Bs, 1947–62Acrobat (4CD set), $20.99 Howlin’ Wolf: The Complete RPM & Chess Singles As & Bs, 1951–62Acrobat (3CD set), $17.99...
View ArticleThe Centralization Paradox
On this past January 12, Martha Derthick passed away at the age of 81. Obituaries duly appeared in the American elite media: Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and so on. Save for...
View ArticlePaper Machinations
Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Usby Kabir SehgalGrand Central Publishing, 336 pp., $28 On June 22, 1775, the self-declared Continental Congress issued $2 million in bills...
View ArticleCharacter Acting
The Road to Characterby David BrooksRandom House, 317 pp., $28 The contemplation of virtue is never a bad thing, and many of us don’t do it as often as we ought. It was once the case that moral essays...
View ArticleAin’t It Grand?
What Good Is Grand Strategy?: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bushby Hal BrandsCornell University Press, 288 pp., $29.95 Back in late fall of 2004, when I...
View ArticleA Conversation with Mindy Miralia
The Hero in Heroin: A Mother and Son’s Journey on Both Sides of the Veilby Mindy MiraliaBalboa Press, 286 pp., $35.95 TAI: With me now is Mindy Miralia, author of a new book called The Hero in Heroin:...
View ArticleSins of the Father
The Spy’s SonBryan DensonAtlantic, May 2015, 368 pp., $26 The Billion Dollar SpyDavid E. HoffmanDoubleday, July 2015, 336 pp., $28.95 Spying is the art of betrayal. If we accept it as the second oldest...
View ArticleBattle of the Asian Giants
Great Game East: India, China, and the Struggle for Asia’s Most Volatile FrontierBy Bertil LintnerYale University Press, 376 pp., $35.00, The enemy of the enemy is my friend…at least until a better...
View ArticleOne Nation, Under the Influence
“Spirited Republic: Alcohol in American History,” on exhibit at the National Archives through January 10, is a lot like a 2 a.m. barroom yarn: rambling, studded with odd and fascinating moments, but...
View ArticleThe Garbage Man Who Would Be King
The King of Kowloon: The Art of Tsang Tsou-choi David Spalding, editor Damiani, 225 pp., $50 In 1956, a garbage man living in the Kowloon neighborhood of Hong Kong, having reached the Dantean age of...
View ArticleThe Fragile Eggs of Haruki Murakami
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimageby Haruki MurakamiKnopf, 2014, 400 pp., $25.95 I grew interested in the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami in the way young people grow interested in...
View ArticleLeaving Iraq
Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacyby Christopher R. HillSimon & Schuster, 2015, 448 pp., $30 The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma...
View ArticleThe Suck, in So Many Words
Breakfast with the Dirt Cultby Samuel FinlayRed Dirt Syndicate, 2012, 318 pp., $11.99 Near the end of his Gulf War memoir, Jarhead, Anthony Swofford notes that “Every war is the same.” A literary...
View ArticleAlfred Chandler’s Second Industrial Revolution
During the annual conference of the European Business History Association in Uppsala a few years ago, I chaired a session featuring some of the best known business historians on the subject of new...
View ArticleThe Politics of a Panic
We Believe the Childrenby Richard BeckPublicAffairs, 2015, 352 pp., $26.99 In August of 1983, Judy Johnson, a single mother in Manhattan Beach, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb, called the police to...
View ArticleShould America Power Down?
Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the Worldby Ian BremmerPortfolio, 2015, 240 pp., $27.95 In 1912, many people predicted that the United States would be one of the most powerful states in...
View ArticleThe Hotel Patriot
The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael HofmannNew Directions, 2015, 192 pp., $14.95 “Why do you people always go wandering around in the world?” So asks a Russian peasant of Mendel...
View ArticleWhat Good Is Liberal Education?
In Defense of a Liberal EducationFareed ZakariaW.W. Norton & Company, 2015, 208 pp., $23.95 About a quarter century ago, during an earlier epoch of the American culture wars, the academy echoed...
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