It wouldn’t be Christmas without a few books under the tree. But how to choose? The authors, editors, and friends of the Claremont Review of Books are here once again to help. With warmest wishes from our fireside to yours, we’re pleased to present—for the third year in a row, so now it’s really a tradition—this selection of reading highlights. May your days be merry and bright!
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David Azerrad
Assistant Professor
Hillsdale College, Van Andel Graduate School of Government
This past year, I have derived great pleasure and learned much from reading transcripts of some classes Leo Strauss taught at the University of Chicago, Claremont Men’s College, and St. John’s College between 1954 and 1973. The opening lectures for each course usually present a grand overview of the history of political philosophy; they are marvelously clear and insightful. There are also courses on philosophers and works he never wrote about systematically (like Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero, Vico, Kant, and Hegel’s Philosophy of History). I even found a session on Tocqueville in the 1954 course on “Natural Right and History.”
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Erika Bachiochi
Fellow
Ethics & Public Policy Center
The re-election of Donald Trump represents the end of a political era and the beginning of something new. But no one really knows what’s next. On the right, virtue ethics, appeals to natural law, and the classical legal tradition are experiencing a worthy renaissance after decades in the catacombs. But so are competing Nietzschean efforts to retrieve not Jerusalem, Athens, or (Catholic) Rome, but manly Homeric virtue shorn of the divine. What a time then to be reading old books, or new books that treat us to the old.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute President Johnny Burtka’s Gateway to Statesmanship (2024) is a welcome contribution for this moment, collecting selections from Xenophon to Churchill. However crucial theories of ethics and justice may be to bring about a hoped-for rebirth of the West, political praxis needs both principles and exemplars to guide right action. Burtka delivers. That Burtka’s selections include political principles and practice from the East as well—with an introduction suggesting that the seeds of modernity were sown well before Machiavelli or Hobbes in the Great Schism of Christendom—offers readers wise to the Western tradition something new.
Another lesser-known selection in Burtka’s collection is by an early 15th-century female thinker who deserves a reading well beyond the handful of well-chosen pages he includes. Widowed with three children at the age of 25, the Italian-born French writer Christine de Pizan is the first woman known to earn a living by her own pen. Her best-known work, The Book of the City of Ladies, employs the allegorical Ladies Reason, Justice, and Rectitude to gather together exemplary pagan, Jewish, Christian, and mythical women, all in defense of women and marriage against popular (“foul-mouthed”) courtly love poetry. Highly recommended as a bright window into the learned mind of a late medieval woman and scholar, the book in its time sparked the “querelle des femmes”—a centuries-long debate on the role and status of women that is experiencing its own resurgence today.
Burtka’s collection however includes not Pizan’s better-known book on women but rather her Book of the Body Politic, one of several celebrated political texts she wrote during the Hundred Years War. Commissioned by the uncle of the French dauphin, it is one of many works at the service of a royal family whose honor she sought to dignify and to preserve in letters. Borrowing from Plutarch the image of the polity as a body, and from Aristotle its purpose in cultivating virtuously the goods common to all, she seeks in the book to impress upon the young prince a truth at the core of political wisdom in any time: that he will only learn to govern his kingdom well if he learns to govern himself.
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Michael Barone
Senior Fellow
American Enterprise Institute
We know how the great mass of immigrants were admitted into this country in the Ellis Island years 1892-1924, thanks to Vincent Cannato’s American Passage (2009). But we know little about how these second-caste residents of the multiethnic Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires got to New York Harbor. Now Steven Ujifusa fills in the blanks with The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I (2023). Like Ujifusa’s two earlier books, on the S.S. United States and the clipper ships, this is a story of ships—and of the larger societies that launched them. I’m glad that the author’s father Grant Ujifusa, originator of The Almanac of American Politics of which I was principal co-author for forty years, lived to see the completion of this excellent book, which explains the arrival on these shores—not by accident, but as an intended result brought about by the work of specific individuals—of men, women, and children who, with their descendants, have done so much to make the country what it is today.
I first got to know Walter Isaacson during the 1988 Republican National Convention when, as Time magazine’s lead political writer, he was a kind of guide for press corps colleagues navigating the bayous and backwaters of his hometown of New Orleans. Since then, Isaacson has brought his skills as a writer, his sensitivity to different historical and cultural backgrounds, and his skills as an explicator of scientific technicalities to write first-rate biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and—now even more timely—Elon Musk (2023). Obviously essential reading about the person who has done more than anyone else, except the candidate himself and perhaps New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, to make Donald Trump the 47th as well as the 45th president of the United States.
Despite Trump’s victory, antidotes are still needed for the dire effects of Wokery. To answer those who depict settler colonialism as the crowning evil in human history, consult the New Zealand-born James Belich’s 2011 Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld. And as an antidote to those who insist that the United States Constitution was enacted to perpetuate slavery, read Sean Wilentz’s 2018 book No Property in Man. Wilentz, a voluble Hillary Clinton supporter whose father and brother owned Greenwich Village’s Eighth Street Bookshop, meticulously examines James Madison’s notes and the Constitution’s text to show how the framers, while recognizing slavery as a creation of state law, were careful not to authorize it as an institution of the federal government.
Finally, if you want to trace some of the more remote origins of our civilization, take a look at the explorations chronicled in Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (2014). Turns out that we owe more than I ever thought to the Frisians.
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Mark Blitz
Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy
Claremont McKenna College
Human Life in Motion: Heidegger’s Unpublished Seminars on Aristotle as Preserved by Helene Weiss (2024) is a work of impressive reconstruction by the University of Ottawa philosopher Francisco Gonzalez. The summary of these seminars from the 1920s expands our understanding of Aristotle through Heidegger’s significant reading. Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953) is the book that introduced many of us to Strauss’ writings, and it remains ever-fruitful in its scope and subtlety. Finally, The Third Reich: A New History (2001) by Michael Burlingame is a thoughtful and detailed work developing the view that the Third Reich was grounded in Germany’s “progressive, and almost total, moral collapse.”
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Christopher Caldwell
Contributing Editor
The Claremont Review of Books
Working on an article about Israel last spring, I picked up a copy of Joshua Cohen’s 2022 novel The Netanyahus, expecting it to be of interest only as a benchmark of literary idées reçues—low expectations that were, if anything, reinforced by the Pulitzer the book had won. My skepticism was misplaced. The plot concerns a historian at an upstate liberal arts college tasked with hosting the Israeli historian Benzion Netanyahu when he arrives, family in tow, to interview for a faculty position. It’s poignant about Jewish assimilation in the United States, profound about the nature and destiny of Zionism, and funny about everything it touches.
Having last read Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay collection The Frontier in American History (1920) in college, I didn’t know what to expect when I returned to it last summer. Something shallow, probably. But what a subtle, paradoxical perspective Jackson has! His frontier is the border between civilization and barbarism—with the United States doomed to be in the vanguard of both. He notes that when American merchants traveled into the wilderness with their firearms, the Indians had to trade for them, lest they be overpowered by their enemies. Who was the barbarian in that transaction?
Merry Christmas! Happy new year!
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John J. DiIulio, Jr.
Frederick Fox Leadership Professor
University of Pennsylvania
President-Elect Donald J. Trump is arguably the most important American political disruptor since President Andrew Jackson. The first ex-president since Grover Cleveland to win a second non-consecutive term, he is also the first president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to launch a movement that might outlive him by decades.
But how will Trump’s second term play out and turn out? Two classic books on the presidency offer special insights, clues, and cautions.
The first book is Richard E. Neustadt’s Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (1960). From 1950 to 1952, “Dick” Neustadt worked as a special assistant to President Harry Truman. The Harvard-trained politics and public administration scholar knew that the U.S. Constitution vested most federal government powers, including the most important ones (like spending money, declaring war, and deciding on the federal court’s appellate jurisdiction) in Congress, not the presidency.
During the first half of the 20th century, however, Congress ceded many of its constitutional powers to the presidency. Even so, Neustadt explained, in our system of separated institutions sharing powers, presidents are still much closer to being “clerks” than they are to being “kings.” Presidential power is ever but “the power to persuade”—persuade those at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue; persuade leaders in major interest groups, subnational elected officials, foreign governments, the media, and other constituencies; and persuade the public at large.
Neustadt, a friend and mentor to me, was the founding leader of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He died in 2003 at age 84. He recognized that presidents, including the one on whose senior staff I served (George W. Bush), were increasingly using executive orders and other non-legislative means to get their way without courting Congress or venturing far beyond their own inner circles for counsel.
Trump has promised to reorganize federal agencies dramatically and make far-reaching changes to federal policies. But as Neustadt reminds us, even for such epic presidents as FDR and Reagan, such changes could be catalyzed but not consummated without new legislation supported by coalitions of the presidentially persuaded.
The other book is Jeffrey K. Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency. Tulis taught at Princeton and retired recently from the University of Texas at Austin. He is one of the most perceptive American politics scholars of the last half-century. The book debuted in 1987. In 2007, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, it was the subject of a symposium in the journal Critical Theory. A decade later, it was re-published by Princeton University in its “classics” series, complete with a new afterword by the author.
As Tulis documented, before Theodore Roosevelt, constitutional norms and customs strongly proscribed presidents from appealing over the heads of Congress to the public at large to garner support for their policy agenda. But by the time Reagan became president in 1981, such appeals were almost universally prescribed, not proscribed.
Thereafter, successive White Houses became ever more like permanent campaign headquarters. In tandem, presidential aides and offices dedicated to rhetoric—speechwriting, communications strategy, public liaison, and others—took precedence over those dedicated to policy formulation.
Even after Barack Obama suffered a policy implementation debacle in his first term with the Affordable Care Act’s “health exchanges,” administrations left it largely to chance how policies enunciated in campaign-style rhetoric were to be translated into actual administrative action. By the time Trump succeeded Obama, the president was less the nation’s chief executive or chief legislator than its rhetorician-in-chief.
Trump, however, may function as the first hyper-rhetorical president. For example, on November 12, 2024, the president-elect proclaimed on “X” that he would be establishing a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” or “DOGE.” But the DOGE is not actually a federal “department,” or even a new White House office. Rather, co-led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the DOGE will “partner with the White House Office of Management and Budget” and “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” regarding how to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash regulations,” and “liberate our Economy,” with its “work to conclude no later than July 4, 2026” as “the perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence.” We may have entered an age in which rhetoric is policy, making Tulis’s book more timely than ever.
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Glenn Ellmers
Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding
Claremont Institute
Whenever I visit a new country, I like to read a novel that gives some texture to the place. In preparation for my first trip to Greece this year, I enjoyed the splendid roman à clef Last of the Wine (1956) by Mary Renault. The book traces the coming of age in 5th-century Athens of a young man from a good family that has fallen on hard times. Socrates, Alcibiades, Pericles, Xenophon, the Olympic Games, and the Peloponnesian War are all brought to life colorfully and sympathetically in Renault’s effervescent prose.
While Athens is glorious, Delphi is magical. If you arrive in the off-season just as the gate opens at 8:00 a.m., you might (as I did) have the whole site to yourself for the first hour. Strolling alone through the ruins on the side of Mount Parnassus, with a majestic view of the Gulf of Corinth, one understands why the Greeks felt the presence of the gods here. At the gift shop, I picked up Delphi: The Oracle and Its Role in the Political and Social Life of the Ancient Greeks (1999), edited by Ioanna K. Konstantinou, which tells the story in rich and fascinating detail with abundant color photographs.
Following this theme, a collection of Leo Strauss’s lectures and writings on the Euthyphro—Plato’s dialogue on piety—was released this year by Penn State University Press, ably edited by Hannes Kerber and Svetozar Y. Minkov. Pagan gods might not seem terribly relevant to the Christmas spirit, but, especially in Strauss’s hands, there is much to learn from Socrates’ investigation of what we owe to our community, and ourselves, in connection with the Good.
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Chris Flannery
Contributing Editor
The Claremont Review of Books
P.G. Wodehouse wrote a hundred or so wonderful books. Once you’ve got a complete set for each story of your home, and have read and re-read them all, you might want to acquaint yourself with another dimension of this great and multi-faceted man. Wodehouse said of all his books that they were “musical comedies without the music.” He knew what he was talking about. As you can learn in The Complete Lyrics of P.G. Wodehouse (2004), edited by Barry Day—a Big Beautiful Book, as our president-elect might say—Wodehouse
had a hand in 19 plays…and was involved in the libretto or lyrics (and frequently both) for almost 40 musical comedies between 1905 and 1934. (He had five shows running simultaneously on Broadway in 1917 alone.) There are more libretti by Wodehouse…than there are by [W.S.] Gilbert.
Wodehouse’s principal collaborators were writer Guy Bolton and composer Jerome Kern. As New Yorker wit George S. Kaufman wrote of the trio in their prime:
This is the trio of musical fame:
Bolton and Wodehouse, and Kern:
Better than anyone else you can name,
Bolton and Wodehouse, and Kern.
Nobody knows what on earth they’ve been bitten by.
All I can say is I mean to get lit an’ buy
Orchestra seats for the next one that’s written by
Bolton and Wodehouse, and Kern.
His greatest hit was the wistful and humorous “Bill,” written with Kern for Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918) but first appearing on stage rewritten slightly by Oscar Hammerstein in Act II of the classic 1927 musical Show Boat. Audra McDonald sings it here, and Rebecca Trehearn gives it a go here.
As Michael Feinstein writes, “Wodehouse is the father of the modern theatre lyric…. Ira Gershwin idolized him and it is easy to understand why.”
Make American Musical Theater Great Again!
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Mary Harrington
Contributing Editor
Unherd
The Dragons and the Snakes (2020) explores the transformation of warfare between “the West and the rest” since the End of History. The author, Australian veteran and military strategist David Kilkullen, draws his metaphor from a 1993 description by incoming CIA director James Woolsey of America’s erstwhile great-power antagonist—the USSR—as a slain “dragon” that has, subsequently, been replaced by a host of smaller, more evasive enemy “snakes.” Since that era, Kilkullen argues, an American military dragon overconfident of perpetual hegemony has remained fixated on costly hardware and traditional military tactics, while its opponents have developed asymmetric counter-tactics that intentionally blur the boundaries between military and civilian, state-sponsored and terrorist, while weaponizing cheap, commercially available modern hardware and communication technologies. In the light of new autonomous military technologies, and Trump’s pledge to end “forever wars,” this analysis of what “war” actually looks like in the 21st century is a sobering one. Altogether, it implies that even ending warfare on “dragon” terms will do little to prevent the “snakes” from seeking to bite.
Women Against The Vote (2007) is a woefully underrated (it is already out of print) academic history of the distaff side of Britain’s anti-suffrage campaign, over the half-century leading up to the 1918 Representation of the People Act. The author, Julia Bush, avoids the usual moral triumphalism, teleological bias, and retrospective denunciations, offering instead a careful reconstruction of the moral, economic, and sociocultural outlooks that gave rise to the extensive anti-suffrage movement among thousands of 19th-century British women. She offers vivid biographies of leading anti-suffrage women, including the prominent novelist Mary Augusta Ward and explorer Gertrude Bell, many of whom took well-organized and high-minded social reform movements to be their “sphere,” distinct from the male one of party politics. Bush is a scrupulous, readable, and fair-minded chronicler of a little-understood group; Women Against The Vote both persuasively evokes these women’s deeply felt worldview in context, and gently draws out its many paradoxes.
However numerous and vocal its challengers today, liberal individualism remains the default ground for the vast majority of contemporary Western political discourse. Inventing the Individual (2014) offers an intricate, erudite intellectual and political history of that worldview. Its author, philosopher Larry Siedentop, died earlier this year; this was his last book, and it is rightly hailed as a modern classic even by those less devoted than its author to liberal precepts or more attached than he to the faith whence, in Siedentop’s masterly telling, these precepts emerged. Inventing the Individual meticulously charts the development of liberal modernity’s crucial central categories and moral intuitions—the “individual”, the valorization of autonomy, the necessity of equality between individuals—via the long history of premodern Christianity. Siedentop offers a careful chronological account that reads closely across a panoply of sources, from St Augustine and William of Ockham to medieval canon lawyers, without ever losing track of the overall direction of travel. The result is so rich it must be savored slowly.
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Mark Helprin
Senior Fellow
Claremont Institute
Wikipedia is a blowzy, fat, careless, often inaccurate, and often biased thing that reflects the lowered standards of the age. And, it is badly written. I know this, inter alia, because of its high inaccuracy in regard to its treatment of my life. Nonetheless, like so much that we tolerate despite great faults, for the sake of convenience, it has triumphed—poisonously.
Seeking an antidote, I frequently turn to what may be the most interesting, authoritative, and comprehensive book in the world. That is the compact version of The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition, wonderfully squozen (to quote Samuel Goldwyn) into 29 paperback-sized, 1,000-page volumes. The stock is thin, crisp, and acid-free, the print very small but easily readable and enjoyable in itself, and the quality of the scholarship spectacular. Of course, as it is more than a hundred years out of date, many of its articles must be read with caution and hindsight. But in the main it is beautifully written and authoritative—and calming, too, as it is so far removed from the totalitarian ideological seepage that has stained almost every aspect of modern intellectual life.
Pulling it off the shelf and reading at random is intensely satisfying and entertaining, especially in its treatment of things—such as dredging, batrachia, the Ostade, the cat, and every possible obscurity of England and the Empire—that might not jump out at you from cable news. I looked up the small town where I grew up and was pleased to find it beautifully and accurately portrayed. In short, knowledge as pleasure.
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Scott W. Johnson
Co-Founder
Power Line Blog
Washington Post reporter and editor David Finkel spent eight months embedded with soldiers of the Army’s 2-16 infantry battalion in Iraq during the surge. Finkel’s devastating and widely praised The Good Soldiers (2009) is based on the time he spent with the unit in Iraq. Thank You For Your Service (2013) is his sequel. He follows a few of the soldiers from his first book as they return home, all but effacing himself from the starkly intimate scenes to which he bears witness. Reading this utterly brilliant book, one sees in the person of Army Vice Chief of Staff Peter Chiarelli (now retired) how the Army itself has struggled to come to terms with the stress disorders that Finkel memorably brings to life. One leaves the book wanting to learn more and do right by those whom we formulaically thank for their service.
Adam Schumann, a 2-16 soldier Finkel met in Iraq, becomes one of Finkel’s protagonists in Thank You For Your Service. The Pathway Home (at the Veterans Home of California-Yountville in northern California) figures prominently as a locus of sorely needed treatment for the demons with which Schumann contends. His graduation from the program after four months toward the end of the book is full of pain and hope.
Thank You For Your Service was published in 2013. Five years later, in a tragic real-life postscript, a veteran and former Pathway Home patient took hostage and then murdered the program’s executive director, Christine Loeber, Clinical Director Dr. Jen Golick, and psychologist Dr. Jennifer Gonzales of the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Francisco. The Pathway Home lost two-thirds of its leadership team. The murderer was a recently expelled Pathway Home patient who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Everything David Garrow writes is worth reading. He is a dogged researcher and scrupulous historian. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017) is a magnificently well-researched book. Among other things, Garrow conducted more than a thousand interviews over nine years for it. His compelling narrative runs to 1078 pages of text supported by 300 pages of footnotes (even though Garrow relegates his comments on Obama’s presidency to a 50-page epilogue). The interested reader will be surprised by Garrow’s discoveries as well as the level of detail that he has achieved. The historian David Greenberg suggests the riches on offer at Politico in “Why so many critics hate the new Obama biography.” Working on the book, Garrow secured a total of eight hours of off-the-record interviews with Obama. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.
Edward Jay Epstein was my beau ideal of a journalist. As I communicated my admiration to him, we became (mostly distant) friends. He burrowed inside an improbably large number of mind-boggling stories over the course of his long career—starting with Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (1966), a best-seller he wrote as a thesis for his master’s degree from Cornell. For that book Epstein reviewed the records of the commission and interviewed every member with the exception of Earl Warren. His thesis adviser was Andrew Hacker. When Ed died earlier this year, Hacker told The New York Times: “It was the only master’s thesis I know of that sold 600,000 copies.”
At age 87, Epstein finally got around to telling the story of his own life in Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe (2023). As one might infer from the subtitle, Ed led an intriguing life. The book is by turns engrossing and hilarious. I have only one complaint about it: its 387 pages are not enough. It’s too damn short. Assume Nothing seems to me a classic American autobiography. Ed’s death this past January leaves a vacuum that will not be filled.
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A.M. Juster
Poet
Translator
The American and British literary establishments continue to pretend that we are living in “a golden era of poetry.” In reality, the poets most celebrated among the chattering classes are irrelevant outside their MFA programs and postmodernist literary journals. The kind of poets who once influenced both cultures broadly—the Robert Frosts, the Seamus Heaneys, the Sylvia Plaths, the Derek Walcotts—are gone. The venerable literary journals of today are largely unreadable and are rapidly losing paid subscribers, which is why college presidents are killing those journals in unprecedented numbers and few people care.
The good news is that the rebel alliance of poets who believe in traditional poetry, frank criticism, and actual literary standards is growing and gaining traction. Paul Dry Books, a press supporting a wide range of New Formalist poets, has published Dana Gioia’s superb new book of essays, Poetry as Enchantment (2024). Gioia, who served as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities under George W. Bush, catalyzed the school of thought known as New Formalism with his controversial 1991 Atlantic essay, “Can Poetry Matter?”.
Two of Gioia’s longer essays—the title piece and “Robert Frost and the Modern Narrative Poem”—are aimed at academics discontented with the rigid ideologies of the academy. However, his “short takes” on poets are accessible to any reader. In that section he continues to bring Philip Larkin the attention he deserves in the United States and champions extraordinary poets he almost singlehandedly rescued from oblivion, most notably Weldon Kees and Samuel Menashe.
There is good news on the other side of the Atlantic as well. The poetry editor for the most significant British literary institution, The Times Literary Supplement, is a terrific poet with a formal bent. Camille Ralph’s debut book of poetry, After You Were, I Am (2024) rehabilitates the genre of the “after poem” in which, as with classical Chinese poetry, a poet expresses admiration for an accomplished poet by writing in the style of that poet. In recent years unaccomplished poets have cranked out truckloads of such poems, most of which pay tribute to poets as unaccomplished as they are in order to get a head start in the mutual backscratching that is so essential to an inbred culture with ideological rules but no literary standards.
Ralph’s work relies instead on her thoughtful reading of George Herbert, John Donne, and other great poets (as well as a few more obscure models). She displays a rare gift for Audenesque punning and rhyming—what literary outsider could not savor her “Come nanny of nanny states / come hour of hourly rates”? One can also find this kind of wit and formal command of language in Ian Duhig’s An Arbitrary Lightbulb (2024).
Meanwhile, just as Aaron Poochigian and Jason Guriel have been reviving the verse novel, J.C. Scharl has probably started a revival of the verse play with her stunning Sonnez Les Matines (2023). If space allowed, I would recommend in detail Amy Glynn’s Romance Language (2023), Peter Vertacnik’s The Nature of Things Fragile (2024), Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s St. Matthew Passion (2024) and Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology (2024) by April Lindner and Ryan Wilson.
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John B. Kienker
Managing Editor
The Claremont Review of Books
James Wilson of Pennsylvania is our greatest forgotten founder. An émigré from Scotland who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he was named by President Washington to the first Supreme Court but died a few years later of sudden illness, in poverty, before his 56th birthday. He is remembered, if at all, not alongside Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison for his keen mind and argumentation but as the pathetically doughy butt of jokes in the otherwise delightful stage musical 1776. Mark David Hall’s The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson (1997) is the best introduction available, providing a brief sketch of his life before giving a nice overview of his writings. Alas, the best one can do for a full-scale biography is Page Smith’s prosaic, nearly 70-year-old account, which cries out for some enterprising historian to replace.
To the making of books about Abraham Lincoln, however, there is no end. I recommended three in my reading list for 2022, and have three more to recommend this year. Which is altogether fitting and proper. As Diana Schaub noted earlier this year in the CRB, “When democracy is in trouble, the thoughts of the nation turn to Abraham Lincoln.” And to that end, the book Schaub was reviewing, Allen Guelzo’s new meditation on Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment is well worth reflecting upon.
Don Fehrenbacher’s Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (1962) tracks the Springfield lawyer’s return to politics, giving a lively sense of the precarious maneuvering and coalition-building involved in seeking office and shaping public opinion—and the way partisan media of the day worked to manipulate that opinion. Revisiting the political battles of the 1850s brought to mind that, for as much as the case against abortion parallels the case against slavery, pro-lifers in the wake of the Dobbs decision have a task before them greater than that which rested upon Lincoln: the injustice we seek to reform is more hidden from sight, the Republican Party of our day more divided, and public opinion has been shaped and supported for five decades, not merely a few years, by an erroneous Supreme Court ruling.
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s monumental, deeply researched Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) opens on the moment where Prelude to Greatness ends, with Lincoln’s successful run for the presidency in 1860. Goodwin’s account is wide-ranging, tracing the lives of the three higher-profile politicians who vied with Lincoln for the Republican nomination and who would fill out key positions in his cabinet—Secretary of State William Seward, Attorney General Edwin Bates, and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase (Secretary of War Edwin Stanton becomes a featured player, too). The separate biographical threads of the book’s extensive first part come together and pay off in the book’s lengthier second part once Lincoln takes office. By situating the 16th president in the dramatic broader context of these ambitious personalities, Goodwin ably highlights his principled, shrewd calculations in holding together an occasionally tempestuous White House and delicate political coalition while striving to restore a divided country.
As democracy has become more troubled in our own day, the nation as a whole hasn’t turned to Lincoln so often as it has to U-Haul. Three years after relocating my family from California to Texas, I took Claremont Institute President (and fellow defector) Ryan Williams’s recommendation to get to know our newly adopted state by reading T.R. Fehrenbach’s standard one-volume history, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (1968). It’s peculiarly organized and at least 20% too long, but it does feature stirring stretches on the failure of the Spanish mission system that framed California to take hold in Texas; the region’s settlement by Kentucky frontiersmen; the defining siege of the Alamo and the battle of San Jacinto; Sam Houston’s desperate efforts to keep Texas in the Union on the eve of the Civil War; the invention and refinement of the Colt revolver; the Indian wars and formation of the Texas Rangers; and the culture of the western hero who was “gracious to ladies, reserved toward strangers, generous to friends, brutal to enemies.”
Finally, more than a decade ago, in 2010, Ignatius Press first released its Catholic Study Bible edition of the New Testament. Now, after years of waiting and eager anticipation, the time is fulfilled and the project complete with the publication of the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Old and New Testament, the finest single volume for encountering Scripture from the heart of the Church, densely packed with introductions and outlines for every book, faithful theological essays, explanatory footnotes, word studies, cross-references, a timeline and doctrinal index, as well as dozens of maps, all of which brilliantly show how the new is concealed in the old and the old revealed and fulfilled in the new.
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Spencer A. Klavan
Associate Editor
The Claremont Review of Books
The FX streaming adaptation of James Clavell’s Shōgun was just good enough to get me interested in the 1975 novel, once an internationally renowned bestseller. And holy crow, this thing holds up. An airplane read for back in the days when people read on airplanes, it’s 1500 or so pages’ worth of masterfully plotted intrigue, swordplay, and romance against the lush dramatic backdrop of 16th-century Japan.
There’s something deliciously pulpy about this sweeping adventure story, but Clavell isn’t remotely shallow. As a POW in the Pacific theater during World War II, he became a careful student of Japan’s warrior ethos. But he never gave way to hating his adversaries or their country despite the starvation and imprisonment he suffered at their hands. In fact, Shōgun betrays an immense respect for Samurai honor culture even as it unflinchingly showcases the brutality of a civilization unschooled in Christian respect for human life. In the forbidden love affair between the English sailor John Blackthorne and the Japanese Catholic convert Toda Mariko, Clavell stages an intimate and subtle culture clash in which both East and West come across as noble and barbaric by turns.
Readers of the CRB may not need me to tell them that David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989) is a tour de force of scholarly insight. But it’s one of those books that more often gets cited than read, and this year I finally had the immensely rewarding experience of digesting its argument in full. Hackett takes a simple but powerful premise—that American history and politics can be understood in terms of the dynamic interplay between four English colonial subcultures—and works it out in rich detail with the help of voluminous primary sources. Each of his four groups emerges in full and living complexity—from the surprisingly tender courtship rituals of the Massachusetts Puritans and the uncompromising moral austerity of the Pennsylvania Quakers, to the tempestuous love affairs of the genteel Virginia cavaliers and the rough-hewn dignity of the backcountry Scotch-Irish. This remains a beautiful and, in the oppressive heat of 21st-century politics, a refreshingly measured love letter to our beautiful mutt of a country.
The best contemporary fiction I read this year was How I Won a Nobel Prize, by first-time novelist Julius Taranto. A graduate student is hovering tantalizingly on the verge of modeling semiconductors, a breakthrough in energy technology that would bring fame and fortune alike. But to finish her research she has to drag her partner out to an island research institute for canceled academics, which he loathes. It’s a poignant comedy of manners that manages to parody both academic leftism and its detractors without ever being pedantic or mean-spirited. But for sheer delight, nothing compared this year to Mark Forsyth’s Etymologicon (2011), a meandering ramble among the tangled roots of the English language. With enormous wit and quintessentially British self-deprecation, Forsyth links pumpernickel to partridges and psychiatry to pasta by way of the butterfly, looping the whole thing into a charming daisy chain. Grade-A bedside reading when you’re settling in for your long Winter’s nap.
***
Heather Mac Donald
Thomas W. Smith Fellow
Manhattan Institute
The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern, 1942), by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), is an autobiographical chronicle of the Hapsburg Empire’s final days and the subsequent catastrophes of early 20th-century Europe. Zweig was a precocious poet, dramatist, biographer, and translator who grew up in a bourgeois Jewish home in late-19th-century Vienna. His description of that fin-de-siècle world—with its stable interest rates and property rights, its urban populace enraptured by the theater—is arguably the most enthralling part of this riveting memoire. Zweig was among a group of young students who rebelled against the mediocrity of their high school by throwing themselves passionately into the creation and consumption of art. Zweig reminds us that the Victorian taboos around innocuous physical realities, in full force during his adolescence, were indeed as hysterical as we have been led to believe, lest anyone think that our present-day contempt for Victorian sexual morals simply rationalizes the chaos that follows from untrammeled permissiveness.
The first World War shattered cozy Viennese stability and everything that underpinned it. Zweig’s description of Austria’s postwar hyperinflation is harrowing, but Germany’s postwar economic woes turned out to be still worse. Yet even as Zweig’s adopted home in Salzburg struggled with depredation, the arts thrived, especially in and around the newly created Salzburg Festival. In a sign of humanity’s regenerative powers, Austrian society eventually regained prosperity—only to be broken yet again by a worse cataclysm.
Zweig’s deliberately cosmopolitan life brought him into contact with leading political and cultural personages of the early 20th century—Theodor Herzl, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, Gerhart Hauptmann, Auguste Rodin, Walter Rathenau, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Strauss, Rudolf Steiner—many of whom are vividly limned here. Other figures, such as the Belgian symbolist poet Émile Verhaeren, who inspired some of Zweig’s most devoted advocacy, have been all but lost to time. One wonders what we are missing.
Zweig was a committed internationalist. Those institutions that claim to overcome the scourge of destructive nationalism—this would include nearly every bloated bureaucracy seated in Brussels, Geneva, Strasbourg, and Vienna—have proven to create more problems than they solve. The result has been a renewed appreciation for national identity. Zweig’s own anti-nationalism is nevertheless understandable in light of the fanatical hatreds he witnessed.
Beautifully written, deeply felt, The World of Yesterday brings to life the upheavals that continue to shape the world of today.
***
Dan Mahoney
Senior Fellow
Claremont Institute
The articles, essays, and reviews collected in John O’Sullivan’s Sleepwalking Into Wokeness: How We Got Here (2024) display a rare and delightful combination of lucid prose, discerning historical insight, and firmly measured judgment. O’Sullivan is the kind of journalist, writer, and thinker who barely exists anymore: one learned and morally astute enough to take in the full sweep of human events with its interplay between politics and intellectual life. Whether writing on the “cultural revolution” that is wokeness, the transformation of liberal democracy into something neither liberal nor democratic, “the heroic age of conservatism,” or champions in the fight against totalitarianism such as Cardinal József Mindszenty, Robert Conquest, or Jeane Kirkpatrick, O’Sullivan instructs humanely and artfully. He is at home in Britain, America, and Mitteleuropa, and his commitment to the civilized inheritance of the West is apparent on every page of this welcome volume.
For the first time in 30 years or so, The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle are back in print. Like Winston Churchill, whose speeches and histories won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, de Gaulle combined heroism with eloquence. He was not only a statesman of unimpeachable courage but also a prose stylist of the first rank. The opening 80 pages of this handsome edition—de Gaulle’s account of the French elite’s myriad illusions and evasions on the eve of World War II, leading up to the Fall of France in June 1940—are simply riveting.
De Gaulle chose the solitary path of “assuming” the sovereignty of a free, independent, and self-respecting France when those around him succumbed to defeatism and various forms of collaboration. He would continue the fight but not, he insisted, as the “auxiliary” of “another power.” That caused friction with his greatest supporter, Churchill, and drew the unremitting hostility of FDR who saw him, quite wrongly, as an aspiring despot. De Gaulle’s artfully sketched portraits of the great actors in the drama are truly memorable: Churchill is “the great champion of a great enterprise and the great artist of a great history” who used “the angelic and diabolic gift” that is politics and political speech “to rouse the heavy dough of the English as well as to impress the minds of foreigners.” “Old age is a shipwreck,” de Gaulle writes in reference to Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun turned pathetic Vichy defeatist in league with Hitler, the totalitarian “Moloch,” who “based his colossal plan on the strength he attributed to man’s baseness. Yet men are made of souls as much as clay.”
One would not know it from the splenetic denunciations of the book that have appeared in the British press, but Jordan B. Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine (2024) is a masterpiece of rare interest and penetration. His brilliant (if sometimes idiosyncratic) readings of six crucial episodes from the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament are neither overly literal nor steeped in the scientistic scorn of the demi-educated whom Friedrich Schleiermacher called the “cultured despisers” of God and religious truth. Peterson vindicates the divine presence in the world, and in the human soul, arguing that the “still voice of conscience” provides powerful evidence of “an intrinsic moral order” through which God speaks to human beings even more strikingly than He does through the order of (physical) nature. This is an insight of St. John Henry Newman’s, renewed here in Peterson’s inimitable way. Cain’s rejection of that intrinsic moral order, Elijah’s and Noah’s loving and obedient response to the divine call of conscience, and Jonah’s intermittent rejection and obedience, truly come alive in this book. Peterson ably traces the intimate connection between tyranny and the rejection of a divinely inspired moral order outside and above the human will—in a word, hell. One eagerly awaits Peterson’s promised sequel on the divine presence as revealed by the New Testament.
***
Emmet Penney
Creator
Nuclear Barbarians
Leo Marx was one of the dons of the now-forgotten Symbol and Myth school of American history, which lost out to post-colonial and hard-line empirical competitors in the academy after the 1960s. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) was his masterwork, a broad survey of the American relationship with technology that will re-jigger anyone’s assumptions about how we have reckoned with the dawn of the machine age as a nation. Once you finish it, you’ll file it onto your “to re-read” shelf without a doubt.
It’s a wonder that Chester Himes isn’t better known in the American noir and crime fiction pantheon. As hard-boiled and well-plotted as any Hammett novel, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) follows the exploits of Harlem detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones as they attempt to solve a mass shooting case that played out during a fraudulent Back to Africa organization’s fundraising event. Is there race talk? Sure, but it’s unsentimental and free of moralizing, a realistic element of the social backdrop. The mystery unfolds with deft twists and turns; certain passages were so funny, I actually guffawed. Plus, it’s short.
Writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips (working with his son Jacob as colorist) have done something thought impossible in American comics: they’ve revived crime fiction. Westerns and noir comics still sell well in Europe, but they have met with spotty success in their land of origin. Pulp (2020) combines both genres. The story follows a former cowboy, now an old man who writes loosely autio-biographical pulp fiction, as financial desperation draws him into one last heist in 1930s New York. Brubaker’s writing is at its best here. Sometimes we can’t run from who we are, even if we’re chasing redemption. We might even find that the world needs cruelty—our cruelty—to balance the scales of justice.
***
Sally Pipes
President and C.E.O.
Pacific Research Institute
Though it’s not a policy book, my favorite this year is Doctor Sally (1959) by my favorite author, P.G. Wodehouse. After a long and grueling election campaign, this book is a tonic and breath of fresh air for all who enjoy light, romantic books.
I instantly identified with Dr. Sally Smith, a medical doctor from New Jersey who travels to England to play golf and do some locums at London hospitals. While I am an economist and not an M.D., I specialize in health policy. While not a golfer, I am a tennis player. And we both love to work!
Dr. Sally meets Bill Bannister, an English aristocrat, who falls in love with her at first sight but has to feign illness in order to get her attention. Having invited her to his large, ancestral home in the country using illness as an excuse, he sets about trying to make her fall in love with him. She will have none of it until she discovers that he is not a “lie about” but a hard-working farmer—at which point Bill Bannister says to Dr. Sally, “I’m not ill. I’m in love.” “Yes,” says Dr. Sally, “that is what I diagnose, acute love!” They live happily ever after. You will not be disappointed.
***
Andrew Roberts
Biographer
Historian
Con Coughlin’s Assad: Triumph of Tyranny (2024) is a remarkable and truly gripping book by a veteran British war correspondent who has visited Syria many times, was nearly captured by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and has already written biographies of Assad’s fellow-tyrants Ayatollah Khomeini (2010) and Saddam Hussein (2005), with whom Assad clearly has a good deal of traits in common. Coughlin gets right deep inside the warped personality of one of the most evil men on the planet.
Alon Penzel is a 23-year-old Israeli journalist and social activist who, hours after October 7, visited the ravaged kibbutzim and villages to take down the testimonies of the survivors. Testimonies Without Boundaries (2024) is the result—raw and immediate, sickening and infuriating, it offers insight into the sheer ferocity and medieval sadism of the Hamas terrorists. Amazon banned sales of the book for weeks, but this is history unfettered.
A.N. Wilson reminds us why he is the greatest literary biographer writing in the English language today with his Goethe: His Faustian Life (2024). This is an unashamedly intellectual biography written by an intellectual about an intellectual, but not for intellectuals, as the general reader (like me) is wafted along effortlessly through the eddies of six decades of German literary history in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in the company of its greatest genius.
***
Diana Schaub
Professor of Political Science
Loyola University Maryland
When I heard the news of Eva Brann’s death in October, the first thing I did was call to mind the few occasions, unforgettable, when I was in her presence—full on with her impish radiance. As she liked to say, “a teacher who can’t laugh can’t be serious.” The next thing I did was pull off my shelves the books I own by her: Paradoxes of Education in the Republic (1979); The Past-Present: Selected Writings by Eva Brann (1997); Homage to Americans (2010); and Is Equality an Absolute Good? (2022). They span more than four decades, and my sampling underestimates her writerly longevity by two decades—her first book, in her original discipline of archeology, was published in 1962. After dipping into them again, I immediately ordered two more, both from her longtime publisher Paul Dry Books: Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (2002) and Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested (2020). I might soon order the dozen or so others it would take to complete my collection of original Eva.
My advice is to pick a title that intrigues you (maybe Un-Willing: An Inquiry into the Rise of Will’s Power and an Attempt to Undo It) and plunge in headfirst. A full bibliography of fifty pages, including “toasts” as well as books, articles, reviews, and talks, is available here. The “toasts” belong to her years as Dean of St. John’s College and are priceless. My favorite is her “Kickoff for Women’s Sports, 1995,” a description of a statuette of Athena to inspire the lady Johnnies in “wide-awake wisdom” and “unaggressive war-likeness.” Then the kicker: “You will also observe that besides being very wise and very strong, she is very skinny. For that I worship her with hopeless longing.”
While that particular longing might have been hopeless, not so her manifold higher longings. A legendary tutor at St. John’s College, Eva Brann is unrivalled in her writing on liberal education—essays like “Mere Reading” or “Why Read Books?” or “The Greatness of Great Books” could only come from a lover. With un-clichéd freshness, she shows us a life infused with love for questions, for books, for conversation, and for friendship, including the special variety of “intimate distance” that characterizes teachers and students. Her readings of texts are imaginative (the imagination as a constituent of our being was of great philosophical interest to her), marked by soul-satisfying verbal ingenuity. She is full of human sympathy, accompanied by Jane Austen-esque sharpness of observation and wit—a rare and beautiful combination.
***
Tevi Troy
Director, Presidential Leadership Initiative
Bipartisan Policy Center
I read pollster Patrick Ruffini‘s Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Reshaping the GOP (2023) before the 2024 election and I’m glad that I did. It explained a lot of the forces at work that led to the GOP’s unexpectedly convincing victory in November. Since then, Ruffini has been getting a lot of kudos for getting it right and they are well deserved. As he put it after the election, “The FDR coalition is being dismantled piece by piece and reassembled in Donald Trump’s GOP.” Ruffini’s book explains why and how that is happening.
***
Amy Wax
Robert R. Mundheim Professor of Law
University of Pennsylvania Law School
Years ago, as an attorney in the Reagan and Bush Justice Departments, I pledged to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution of the United States. My colleagues and I sometimes disagreed on the Constitution’s meaning, but never doubted our Constitution was worth preserving. In the “woke” world of legal academia I occupy today, disagreement about meaning has morphed into assaults on the Constitution itself. Yuval Levin, in this year’s American Covenant, effectively answers those attacks by expounding on the constitutional design’s response to man’s fallen nature. By pushing back against a progressive, utopian vision of mankind as “socially constructed,” malleable, and perfectible, he highlights the framers’ ever-present awareness of man’s flaws and defects in their search for a constitutional blueprint to check and constructively channel them.
In this election year, with the voting public more divided than ever, it helps to remind ourselves of how we got where we are and why we are here. There is no better guide than Charles Murray’s magisterial 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America. With a singularly gimlet eye, Murray ably describes the trends that define our social and economic landscape. Looking only at the American white population, he documents a growing divergence—in geography, mores, attitudes, and behavior—between a college-educated class with outsized political and cultural power, and the rest of society, which sees itself losing influence over society’s direction. These divides auger the political antagonisms that led to Trump’s election in 2016 and 2024 and continue to shape our country today.
The best self-help book I ever read was not a self-help book. It was Adaptation to Life (1977), by Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, which first impressed me when it was published in the late ’70s and which I recently had occasion to revisit. Vaillant summarized the results of the Harvard Grant Study of Adult Development, initiated in 1937, which examined the trajectories of 145 male Harvard graduates through detailed interviews and data collected from the men over decades.
The Grant Study, which continues to the present, contained many insights and life lessons that have lost none of their punch: Although the Grant Study men were among the best and the brightest—the “privileged,” as we say—their lives were far from untroubled. What mattered most for them was not the absence of adversity, but how they dealt with it. The “adaptive styles” that served them best were stoicism, sublimation, humor, and anticipation—that is, methodical thought and looking before leaping. Love and work were the anchors, and the most successful achieved both. Relationships, diligently cultivated, were paramount to their happiness.
Could a book about a bunch of mostly upper-class, mostly WASP men from the greatest generation speak to this middle-class female Jewish child of the 1950s? It could and it did. It told me what my parents tried to teach me and I eventually came to know: duty is not a prison, but an anchor and a salve. Conventions and traditions don’t stifle: they direct and steady. And don’t forget to laugh. George Valliant’s book is a worthy guide for conservatives.
Finally, no list of new books worth noting this year would be complete without Steve Sailer’s Noticing. This anthology of Sailer’s online columns, many previously published for the now defunct VDARE website and other politically incorrect outlets, is replete with fresh, heterodox, good-natured insights that refuse to truck with received wisdom. Ranging across timely subjects like immigration; citizenship; the cult of diversity; gender and race differences; the IQ bell curve; the sports prowess bell curve; racial hoaxes; black homicide and highway bedlam post George Floyd and Michael Brown; journalism’s solecisms; mass shootings; and characters ranging from Barack Obama to Edward Saïd, his essays have earned him a loyal online following. And who can forget his catchy apothegms: magic dirt; invade the world, invite the world; Sailer’s law of mass shootings; Sailer’s law of female journalism; the Ferguson effect; and more. Read the book and enter into Sailer’s clever, naughty world. Once you notice, you can never un-notice.
***
Jean Yarbrough
Gary M. Pendy, Sr. Professor of Social Sciences
Bowdoin College
David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama, Rising Star, was largely ignored when it came out in 2017 because it concluded that Obama turned out as president to be a “hollow vessel.” Even if you don’t read all of this massive tome, the last chapter on his brief Senate stint and the epilogue on Obama’s presidency are not to be missed. I’d also recommend the insightful exchange in TABLET between David Garrow and David Samuels on the meaning of Obama.
I missed Robert T. Gannett, Jr.’s Tocqueville Unveiled (2003) when it came out, but I’m reading it now. Gannett, an independent scholar who opted for a life of community organizing in Chicago, does a wonderful job of relating Tocqueville’s analysis of administrative centralization in the Old Regime to the enduring challenge of preserving liberty in the modern world.
As we near the demise of the tyrannical DEI regime, it’s worth recalling what we mean by culture and how we can distinguish it from both ideologically driven claptrap and pop culture. In his short book Modern Culture, first published 1998 and reprinted numerous times, Roger Scruton covers the waterfront.
Having twice visited the beautiful city of Budapest, I am eager to know more about it at its height. Hungary will be given its due in the new administration, so there could not be a better time to learn more about it from one of its most gifted writers, John Lukacs, in Budapest 1900 (1988).
Finally, skipping through the Advent season to Lent, I promise myself in 2025 to read Dante’s Paradiso. Along with it, I’ll be re-reading Rod Dreher’s engaging How Dante Can Save Your Life (2017). I read Dreher first before reading the Inferno and the Purgatorio, and it inspired me to tackle the Divine Comedy. 2025 is the year to do it!
