the New York Times Books & Reviews

A Hedgehog After All

When Isaiah Berlin died last November, there was a cascade of adulatory essays and obituaries, all of them well deserved. Yet there is a sense in which the wrong Berlin was being celebrated; or if not exactly the wrong Berlin then only a half of h

Hayek's Slippery Slope

Friedrich Hayek's ideas,  particularly those set out in The Road to Serfdom, have been subject to extraordinary ups and downs in learned, as well as in popular and political, estimation.

Our Man in Nairobi

Smith Hempstone's  narrative of his diplomatic "arm wrestling" with a recalcitrant Moi regime between 1989 and 1993 is lucid, witty and comprehensive.

Enough Blame to Go Round

H.R. McMaster has written a scathing indictment of America's civilian and military leadership during the early phases of the Vietnam war, and he speaks--to a military audience, at any rate--with unique moral authority.

Another Country, Review of David Horowitz's Radical Son: A Journey Through Our Times

While both Rosenblatt and Horowitz have had second thoughts about the 1960s, their assessments of this fateful decade are strikingly different.

A Book for the Times, Review of Norman Davies' Europe: A History

Davies has written a work worthy of the remarkable continent with which he deals; a continent that is now struggling to redefine and reunify itself, and whose cultures have been released once again to meet and mingle.

The Great Doomsayer: Oswald Spengler Reconsidered

Today, looking back, The Decline of the West can be seen to stand at the gate whereby entered such pervasive intellectual fashions as postmodernist relativism, multiculturalism, and hostile suspicion of dead white European males.

The Nature of the Beast

Review of Walter Laqueur's Fascism: Past, Present Future (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996); Roger Eatwell's Fascism: A History (New York: Allen Lane, 1996).

Off-Center on the Middle Kingdom; Review of Richard Bernstein's and Ross H. Munro's The Coming Conflict with China

Bernstein and Munro reject the view that Sino-American relations are fundamentally sound because China is weak, needs us as a trading partner, and relies on the United States to hold back Japan.

Hassner's Bad Bad Review

Pierre Hassner's review of my book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, is highly unfavorable, which is his right to be. But it is also a mixture of disingenuousness, inaccuracy, misrepresentation, and calumny.

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May 22, 2013