Reviewed: Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars Is More Important Than Winning Them by David Keen (Yale University Press, 312 pp., $38). Heraclitus said that war is the father of all things, and though the great Greek’s utterances are  wisdom for the ages, this one-liner is way past its sell-by date. Sure, war is undeniably the big daddy of bigger military […]

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Reviewed: Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell (PublicAffairs, 320 pp., $26.99). Sixty percent of Republicans do not believe in evolution. Only 11 percent of Tea Party supporters think man-made climate change is real. But according to Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, authors of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and […]

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Reviewed: Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, by Linda Hirshman (Harper, 464 pp., $27.99). Wear at least three “gender-appropriate” garments to the bar or risk a police bust. Get booted from the Army for loving a consenting adult. Marry your beloved and keep paying the IRS as though you were single. The spectrum of humiliations and civil […]

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Reviewed: Land of Promise: An Economic History of The United States, by Michael Lind (Harper, 592 pp., $29.99). America is fickle. Or at least our economic history is. According to Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise, we can’t make up our minds about the role of the federal government in the economy, and the result […]

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Reviewed: Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $26). We associate Victorians with plenty of moral codes and few women’s rights. But as Kate Summerscale meticulously documents in Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace, there was more afoot in the era than its rigid outward manners would suggest. At […]

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