How Democracies End
Adam Przeworski’s new book, Crises of Democracy, demonstrates that he is an unusual creature—a liberal with equanimity.
Page by Page: Book Reviews
Mental Illness and the Question of Genetics
Theodore Porter’s contribution to this discussion, Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity, takes a much broader perspective on the eugenics-genetics divide. Instead of seeing eugenics as either a founding contaminant in genetics, or as a temporary aberration in psychiatric science, Porter looks at the much longer history of data collection within the primary sites for psychiatry over several centuries: asylums or mental hospitals.
The Maniacal Persistence of White Power Armies in the United States
The main takeaway here should properly not center on aspects that might be extended by adjacent work, but rather on the fact that, with Bring the War Home, we have been graced with a new go-to account of the contemporary white power movement.
The Last Great White Southerner
Elvis in Vegas is about this moment of resurrection for Elvis, the triumphant return to Vegas in 1969, the course correction from the abominable film career.
How the United States is Losing the Great Game
This is a fascinating book, especially important because it strips the function of foreign policy to first principles of national security and prosperity.
George Washington’s Dishonorable Relations with Native Americans
Calloway offers an incisive analysis of Washington’s most significant half-century of Indian relations (1748-1799) employing ethnohistory, a discipline that here integrates Native American cultural perspectives in evaluating Washington’s complete legacy, warts and all.
The Glory of the American Road
Jeff Guinn’s light-hearted prose takes the reader back to the early twentieth century. The book reads like a musical fugue: Its continuous theme is the annual trip; the variations, the uniqueness of each outing.
The Tie That Binds
Author Yunte Huang underscores throughout Inseparable the extent to which Chang and Eng Bunker valued their privacy, not to mention their struggles to live their adult years far from the stage.
The Mix and Mash-up of Being Human
What exactly does it mean to say that a book will tell us Who We Are and How We Got Here? The immediate tendency is to conclude that the author really thinks, in the most reductive sense, that the “open sesame” code that will release the answers to human questions of identity is buried in our DNA.
Some of the President’s Men
The Fixers is a solid piece of investigative journalism, an anti-Trump book, to be sure, but objective and fair enough to be read by Trump partisans with interest, and even a limited level of enjoyment.
