Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements First Nations issues are evergreen in Canadian politics, rising to prominence regularly, like during the battle over the Meech Lake Accord in the late ‘80s, when Manitoba MLA Elijah Harper and his eagle feather helped scuttle any attempted constitutional amendment (and got Harper elected as an MP shortly after). It was a major [...]
American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism Ned Ryun (Encounter, $25.99, 159 pages) Ned Ryun, founder of American Majority and Voter Gravity, has written a stinging overview of the origins and growth of the so-called Deep State, the class of bureaucrats that have come to rule American society. Ryun shows how bureaucratic rule quickly becomes authoritarian rule. The [...]
Sarah Stilton, Review: Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws: A Critical Edition Edited by W. B. Allen (Anthem Press, $215, 954 pages) There are Marxists and Lockeans, Nietzscheans and Aristotelians but there are no Montesquieuans. The knock against Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu is that he created no system, that he was not a theorizer. Montesquieu is considered a [...]
The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression Edited by Tony Banout and Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago Press, $26, 228 pages) The University of Chicago is justly famous for its defense of freedom of expression and free inquiry against the censorious barbarians at the gates of academia, and within it. Over the past decade, as many universities set out to provide [...]
A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity Michael Cook (Princeton, $54, 895 pages) Michael Cook, a professor of Near-Eastern Studies in Princeton and author of numerous books on Islam, has written a massive, wide-ranging history of the Muslim world, from Muhammad’s birth in the sixth century through is spread over most of the Old World, [...]
The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020 Diarmaid Perriter (Profile, $47, 552 pages) Diarmaid Perriter is a professor of Irish history at University College in Dublin and a columnist for the Irish Times and at times his latest history of Ireland – he has written 14 books on Ireland – seems more journalism than history. That is certainly due to fact that this “history” [...]
Sarah Stilton Review: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari (Signal, $45, 492 pages) Yuval Noah Harari is something of a rock star public intellectual who burst onto the scene with his 2014 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, originally published in Hebrew in 2011. Previously a military historian, the Oxford-trained [...]
The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party Michael Tackett (Simon & Schuster, $44, 397 pages) Michael Tackett’s The Price of Power is a mainstream journalist’s fair-minded account of one of the most important elected figures in U.S. history, a man whose mastering of Senate procedures led him to command and control his party [...]
Paul Tuns Review: We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine by Jordan Peterson (Portfolio, $48, 544 pages) Former University of Toronto psychology professor and international darling of the Right Jordan Peterson’s fourth book, We Who Wrestle with God seems to have landed with a thud after two bestselling self-help books. The massive tome is an exegesis on Genesis, Exodus, and [...]
Why We Love Football: A History in 100 Moments Joe Posnanski (Dutton, $39.99, 392) Joe Posnanski is one of the best sportswriters in the biz because he is fundamentally human and humane when writing about his subject. In Why We Love Football he explores 90 important moments and ten of the best players in NFL history to show why sports can be [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Reviewing journalist Barbara Amiel’s memoir here a few years ago, what struck me most was an observation she made about her time in transatlantic high society, when her husband Conrad Black’s success and fame was at its peak. She was adopted by a circle of rich women, the wives of rich men – [...]
Review Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape and Sex Trafficking (Thesis, $39.99, 304 pages) Takedown is the autobiographical story of one woman’s battle to expose and shutdown one of the internet’s most visited websites, Pornhub. The Canadian-owned pornography aggregator is the 10th most visited website on the internet, infested with child sexual abuse, rape videos, and [...]
The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves Alexandra Hudson (St. Martin’s Press, $39, 416 pages) Alexandra Hudson wrote her book about civility after witnessing first-hand the incivility in Washington D.C. first hand while working for the Department of Education. Her hardship in government is a blessing for readers, for Hudson might not have written about civility had she [...]
Rabble, Riots, and Ruins: Twelve Ancient Cities and How They Were Evangelized Mike Aquilina (Ignatius, $23.50,206 pages) Mike Aquilina is the best-selling author and president of the St. Pauls’ Center for Biblical Theology. His latest book, Rabble, Riots, and Ruins, is an examination of how a dozen famous ancient pagan cities were Christianized: Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, Ephesus, Edessa (Urfa, Turkey), Lugdunum [...]
The Chicago Manual of Style 18 University of Chicago Staff (University of Chicago Press, $97.50, 1180 pages) The offices of The Interim have used the latest Chicago Manual of Style since its present editor took charge of the paper in 2000. While the paper does not adhere to its stylistic conventions (we follow Canadian Press style), it is a regularly consulted guide. [...]