Paul Tuns, Review: Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze (Harper, $39.50, 291 pages) In Over Ruled, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and his former clerk Janie Nitze, make the case that there are way too many laws and regulations that carry criminal punishments in the United States, and that this excess is a [...]
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No Carl Elliott (Norton, $39.99, 355 pages) Medical ethics professor Carl Elliott’s The Occasional Human Sacrifice is unlikely to engender greater trust in the medical profession as it explores six controversial cases in which medical researchers treated human beings as guinea pigs. Often the patients consented to the interventions, albeit without [...]
On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service Anthony Fauci, M.D. (Viking, $48, 464 pages) The autobiography of Anthony Fauci, the public face of both the Trump and Biden White House responses to COVID, provides plenty of fodder for both fans and critics of Fauci’s handling of the pandemic. The books’ errors of fact and evasion of controversies might be forgivable but [...]
Why Does Everything Come in Threes: A Short Book About Everything Peter Kreeft (Ignatius, $22, 146 pages) Peter Kreeft, a modern-day G.K. Chesterton, has a delightful meditation on the persistence of important things coming in threes, modeled on the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity, asserts Kreeft “is the most practical thing in the world,” the First Cause, the [...]
Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope: R.J. Snell (Angelico Press, $28 pb, 182 pages) R.J. Snell, editor-in-chief of The Public Discourse and director of academic programs at the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, has written an important short brief against modern malaise, the false idylls that promise but fail to address that malaise, and the recovery of hope to escape the malaise. [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I have eaten crickets – and many other bugs besides. There was a couple of culinary events for “foodies” showcasing not just insect ingredients but the skills of chefs tasked with making them palatable. And then there were trips to places where bugs are [...]
Fulton Sheen (Cluny, US$20, 233 pages) In 1940, Bishop Fulton Sheen, wrote Freedom Under God, a meditation on the extremisms of liberalism and totalitarianism that idolized the individual and society respectively with no appreciation of the interdependency of the individual and society. Both extremes were guilty of making “redemption and brotherly love” irrelevant, although in different ways. Christianity, Bishop Sheen, the popular [...]
Antoine Campagnon, translated by Catherine Porter (Belknap Press, $29.95, 168 pages) A Summer with Pascal is a light, breezy introduction by Antoine Campagnon to one of the most important Christian apologists, Blaise Pascal. Campagnon, who has written about other French writers (Montaigne, Proust) turns his eye to the 17th century writer who famously gave us Pascal’s Wager, which posits that it is [...]
Oswald Clark: American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation – and Could Again by Yuval Levin (Basic Books, $41, 341 pages) For the last century, the American Left has been frustrated by the U.S. Constitution’s limits on government because, they claimed, it prevented necessary political action to remedy all of life’s ills. In recent decades, some on the American Right have likewise [...]
Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell (Encounter, $45.99. 328 pages) In Pity for Evil, historians Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell, provide a well-documented, scholarly but accessible account of how most people, including feminists, viewed abortion in post-Civil War United States. Using the speeches of suffragists and the writings in publications of the [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements It’s been a rough four years. Everybody knows that. And though their struggles don’t register much with the public, journalists have arguably been having a rough 20 years, probably more. They’d ask for your sympathy but know they’re not likely to get it, though they can write books like Nellie Bowles’ Morning After [...]
The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People Paul Seabright (Princeton University Press, $44, 485 pages) Paul Seabright, an economist at the Toulouse School of Economics, ambitiously applies not only economics but anthropology, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, science, and sociology, to understand how the world’s religions, which he calls platforms -- “structures that bring individuals together in mutually [...]
Paul Tuns: Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization by Brad Wilcox (Broadside Books, $39.50, 293 pages) Sociologist Brad Wilcox, director of the National Family Project at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, promises a lot – or at least argues that marriage promises a lot – in [...]
Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning Eli Burnstein (Union Square & Co, $26, 201 pages) Dictionary of Fine Distinctions is a charming little book that uses pithy descriptions and cute illustrations to delineate the meaning of words that are often confused for one another. Most of these clarifying notes are done so in easily to digest one [...]
Brave New Words: How AI will Re/volutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing) Salman Khan (Viking, $39.99, 237 pages) Salman Khan is the founder of the Khan Academy, a non-profit that provides free online educational instruction for all ages. His Khan Academy videos have been viewed billions of times by more than 150 million users as he has dedicated his life [...]