“Tensions often arise between secular teachings and Biblical beliefs. Many students are reading, say Kant and Nietzsche for the first time. They may be alarmed, but they also may find those writers intoxicating.”

This article is filed under Education, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Religion.

Mearsheimer and Walt have written an excellent exposition of the Israel Lobby, both in articles and in their most recent book. But they have had to spend a great deal of words and time assuring their readers that they are not anti-Semites, an accusation that has been the main force of the attack on them by the Israel Lobby. There is a well-rehearsed chorus of Israel supporters lying in wait for whoever dares to criticize Israel’s policies, ready to pounce, catlike, and with great force on the unfortunate miscreant. What is interesting is that I have yet to see any of Mearsheimer and Walt’s pro-Israel critics challenge the accuracy of what they have written. Those critics rely on the charge of anti-Semitism, as well as vague, unspecified allegations of inaccuracies in what they have written.

This article is filed under Israel, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

Mussolini was not the only dictator of his time. In his Europe, in a time of worldwide economic depression, a whole series of governments were run by “strong men.” Besides Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany, there were authoritarian regimes if not dictatorships in the 1930s in Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. There were Blueshirts in Ireland, Blackshirts in Britain, and Vidkun Quisling’s followers in Norway. At the eastern end of Europe lay the greatest dictatorship of them all, Stalin’s Soviet Union.

This article is filed under History, Italy, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

He is not much impressed with modernity, rejecting with certitude McDonald’s transfatty fries, the inter-state highway system, television, the decline of literature, and a pernicious militarism that has sponsored the “great American diaspora.”

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

“That said, the thinking that lay behind the invasion of Iraq—the notion that we could transform a society more or less overnight, and in the process “jumpstart democracy” in the entire Middle East—was a colossal act of hubris. And it was essentially a Roman act. It was undertaken with America-centric motives, and with little understanding of the people on the receiving end, or of their ability to oppose us. Those haunting words from Velleius—’as if on a picnic’—pretty much sum up our approach to this and to too many other things.”

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

In my view, the Americans’ most serious problem for the longer term is the development of a new class of super-rich, while at the same time their middle and lower classes find themselves increasingly burdened by debt and worried whether their jobs will be “outsourced” to India or China.

This article is filed under Economics, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

1916 Princeton, a young and still slender Edmund Wilson was advised by professors to “seek the truth, no matter where it lay or who it hurt.”

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Writers.

Niall Ferguson is hot—about as hot as a historian can get.

This article is filed under History, Military, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

The title of Fisk’s new work is a mocking one, taken from a campaign medal his father won as a British officer in the First World War–which few people, and certainly not Fisk, see now as having been a war for civilization.

This article is filed under History, Israel, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.

There is a small cadre of American writers whose gifts and talents are so significant that readers, at least the cognitive ones, are required to procure their latest efforts the moment they come off the press.

This article is filed under Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics.