1,812 words
In 1962, Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine was published and immediately praised. One critic compared it to To Kill a Mockingbird, which had been published in 1960. Like Harper Lee’s book, The Moonflower Vine was the only work of its author. The novel was loved, revered, then went out of print. To Kill a Mockingbird, as we all know, is probably taught more in schools than the Bible and, to the progressive set, it is a kind of Bible.
3,122 words
The Dissident Right overlaps with the environmental movement in an interesting place, and epidemiologist Shanna Swan tells us all about it in her recent book, Count Down. The subtitle to this popular science volume is a real mouthful: “How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.”
7,034 words
“How would you feel if you were black?” We’ve all heard that one before, right? John Howard Griffin sought to discover the answer in 1959 by radically altering his appearance. His book Black Like Me (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961) told the story. As the opening blurb explains:
Griffin worked with Martin Luther King, Dick Gregory, Saul Alinsky, and NAACP Director Roy Wilkins throughout the Civil Rights era. He taught at the University of Peace with Nobel Peace Laureate Father Dominique Pire, and delivered more than a thousand lectures in Europe, Canada and the US.
2,018 words
Marty Phillips
Let Them Look West
Jackalope Hill: 2021
Economics. Christian theology. State-level politics. Journalism. Wyoming History. One will learn a lot about each of these topics when reading Let Them Look West by Marty Phillips. But the novel is so much more than all this. (more…)
1,766 words
Wendy K. Z. Anderson
Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021
This is a book that the author conceived back in 2005 on a cute but shaky premise. A young academic in “Communications Studies,” Wendy K. Z. Anderson proposed that there was a cadre of tech-savvy White Nationalist women out there, and they were using their insidious HTML skills to ensnare and influence other women. (more…)
7,584 words
Michel Faure
Augusto Pinochet
Paris: Perrin, 2020
From September 11, 1973, until March 11, 1990, Chile was ruled by a pitiless military junta under President Augustus Ramón Pinochet Urgate. Michel Faure has written an extraordinarily dispassionate — I am tempted to say passionless — overview of Pinochet’s life from beginning to end. (more…)
2,318 words
Michael Brendan Dougherty
My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home
New York: Sentinel Books, 2019
When this was first published a couple of years ago, reviewers had two distinct takes about the book. One was that it was a wistful, sometimes bittersweet memoir about growing up without a father, because the father was off in Ireland, having never married Dougherty’s American mother; and also, the author had some romantic notions about Ireland, and wasn’t that special. (more…)
You can buy Collin Cleary’s Wagner’s Ring & the Germanic Tradition here.
1,229 words
Collin Cleary
Wagner’s Ring and the Germanic Tradition
Wagnerphile Books, 2021
Richard Wagner is a cornerstone of Western culture. He is one of the few composers that still receive mainstream attention in the 21st century, but usually for negative reasons. Hacks can’t resist the temptation to bash him for his alleged proto-Nazism and anti-Semitism. Even if critics see him as a predecessor to Hitler, many of them still enjoy his music. Few doubt he was a great musician. (more…)
1,014 
words
Matthew Lohmeier
Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military
Self-published, 2021
Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeier of the US Space Force has made the news. He self-published an exposé on the problems of critical race theory in the military and then was abruptly fired as a commander. (more…)
8,807 words
Cornel West
Race Matters
New York: Beacon Press, 1994
Cornel West’s Race Matters is about the black experience in America, much as one might expect. (more…)
1,992 words
Jack London
The People of the Abyss
New York: Macmillan, 1903
Some phrases stay with you for life, and one such for me has been attributed to Carl Jung, but seems rather to be a Latin motto favored by the European alchemists of the 15th century: Liber librum aperit, or, “one book opens another.” (more…)
7,940 words
Peter Gatien
The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife
Seattle: Little A, 2020
Driving with my father one day, we passed an imposing building, the Cornwall headquarters of the Orange Lodge, the Grand Order of British North America. “What’s that, papa?” I asked.
“It’s like a club,” he answered dismissively. (more…)
1,257 words
Andrei Martyanov
Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse
Atlanta: Clarity Press, Inc., 2021
Recently, I had to drive through my Rust Belt homeland to pick up some antique oak furniture that was part of an inheritance. My relatives who still lived in the area had spent the last COVID-19 infected year volunteering at a drive-in food pantry. (more…)
8,536 words
Wilhelm Reich
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1946
What makes Fascists tick? Wilhelm Reich said he had the answer in his groundbreaking book The Mass Psychology of Fascism. (more…)
Detail, Claude Audran the Younger, Cyrus Hunting Wild Boar, fresco at Versailles
1,553 words
Renée Evenson
Power Phrases for Dealing with Difficult People
New York: AMACOM, 2014
Jennifer P. Wisdom
Millennials’ Guide to Management & Leadership: What No One Ever Told You About How to Excel as a Leader
USA: Winding Pathway Books, 2020
If one wants to change the world, one needs to master the basics. (more…)
2,756 words
Richard Lyman Bushman
The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century
New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2018
Most of us who are not farmers are tempted to take farming for granted. We certainly see the results of farming in the produce sections of our supermarkets. Beyond that, we have pleasant images of industrious country folk in denim overalls just doin’ their thing amid amber waves of grain. (more…)
1,962 words
The New England schlockmeister Stephen King is a bad but interesting writer. Success is an interesting phenomenon, after all, and King is one of the most successful writers who have ever lived. Born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, he has sold millions of books in dozens of languages and won even wider exposure through film adaptations of novels like Carrie (1974) and The Shining (1977). (more…)
2,287 words
Paul Findley
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby
Westport, Connecticut: Lawrence Hill & Company, 1985
The late Congressman Paul Findley (1921-2019) was a Republican Congressman from Illinois. His hometown was Jacksonville. Like so many other Midwesterners his ancestors were a mix of the Yankees and Pennsylvanians who created a civilization on the wild prairie. (more…)
1,819 words
Milan Kundera, trans. Michael Henry Heim
The Joke
New York: Harper, 1993 (1967)
Write it on a postcard.
Dad, they broke me.
— Pavement, “Stop Breathing” (more…)
1,803 words
Glenn Gibson
Before the Mic: How to Compose Meaningful, Memorable, and Motivational Presentations
Austin, TX: River Grove Books, 2021
If you want to change the world, you must first master the basics. One of the basics is public speaking. (more…)
2,236 words
James J. O’Meara
Passing the Buck: Coleman Francis and Other Cinematic Metaphysicians
Melbourne: Manticore Press, 2021
Imagine going thirty, forty, fifty, or even sixty years of your life without comprehending the dizzying implications of how some movies, typically — and often charitably — understood to be cringingly awful, actually serve as thaumaturgic runes which reveal glimpses of the painful, beautiful Truth behind this swiftly degenerating stage of Kali Yuga. (more…)
3,006 words
Sean McMeekin
Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II
New York: Basic Books, 2021.
World War II is the central historical event of our time. It’s the only historical reference point for most journalists and laymen. We constantly view every current event through its figures, battles, and atrocities. Hated politicians and leaders are always the next Hitler, everything bad in the world is always the next Holocaust, (more…)
2,076 words
Bryan Caplan
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration
New York: First Second, 2019
Libertarians have long advocated open borders, viewing any limit on immigration as an infringement on personal liberty. To my knowledge, there has never been a book-length treatment of the issue from a libertarian perspective — until now. Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, makes his case for open borders in a graphic novel. (more…)
1,069 words
Anthea Butler
White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021
White Evangelical Racism by Athena Butler is a book where the author is correct, but only partially so.
Butler was an Evangelical Protestant and worked/volunteered at a mega-church in Southern California. (more…)
2,650 words
Beautiful Losers is a collection of essays by the late Samuel Francis, who influenced not only my work, but much of the Right in America today. The omnibus opens with an introduction and brief history of the post-World War II conservative movement in America up to 1993, when Beautiful Losers was published. (more…)
2,628 words
Kevin M. Kruse & Julian E. Zelizer
Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974
New York: Norton & Company, Inc., 2019
Professors Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have written a book in which they argue that the fault lines of America’s polarized political culture started to emerge around 1974. (more…)
3,334 words
Ron Chernow
Grant
New York: Penguin Press, 2017
Ulysses S. Grant is one of the archetypal Americans. A brilliant general who would only accept unconditional surrender. A modest president who eschewed pomp in favor of simple, democratic attire. (more…)
4,348 words
David Skrbina
The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years
Creative Fire Press, 2019
This short book presents itself as the latest in a genre whose brightest lights are Nietzsche’s The Antichrist (which the author quotes extensively) and Savitri Devi’s pamphlet Paul of Tarsus, or Christianity and Jewry (reviewed here; Skrbina has produced an excellent new and revised edition of her related work, Son of the Sun). (more…)
786 words
Jay Black
Guttersnipe
Budapest: Terror House Press, 2021
2nd edition
When I heard that Terror House Press was republishing Guttersnipe by Canadian author Jay Black, I could not resist pre-ordering a copy. (more…)
