Books

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  Ghosts in the Machine

  Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, by Paul Kingsnorth. Thesis, 368 pages, $32   The historian of science E.J. Dijksterhuis memorably characterized the scientific revolution of the early modern period as a “mechanization of the world picture.” What did this amount to? And what was the character of the previous world

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  States of Grace

  Several times in Love and Virtue in a Secular Age, Ralph C. Hancock commends his chief interlocutor, the French political philosopher Pierre Manent, for his “humble audacity.” That is equally an attribute of Hancock’s own book. A professor of political science at Brigham Young University, Hancock has significantly advanced one of Manent’s core projects—that of

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  Blowing Off The Odyssey

  After watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in a sold-out IMAX theater, my husband and I were heading for the exit when we were attacked by smiling employees brandishing free rolled-up posters. Raising our shields, we broke through their phalanx, leaped aboard our vessel moored in the parking lot, and sailed homeward with only a few

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  The Married Vine

  The first marriage in Tuscan history was not between a man and a woman but between a vine and a tree. Before the Etruscans cleared these hills, they were dense with oakwood, through which wild grape vines climbed naturally toward the canopy, wedded to the forest in which they grew. The Etruscans formalized that marriage.

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  Fresh Prince

  Michael Anton’s Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy is an engaging, intelligent, and sobering work. Anton believes or hopes that the book’s essays “form something like a coherent whole.” This characterization is at once modest and immodest as befits the volume, which gratefully and repeatedly acknowledges Harvey Mansfield (to whom the book is dedicated), Leo Strauss,

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  Earthly Paradise

  That citizens of the United States think at all about the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is astonishing. Americans prefer the useful to the theoretical, the modern to the medieval, the plain sense to the allegorical, the unencumbered to the embellished. We are everything Dante is not. And yet Dante is widely read here, especially

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  Let My People Go

  Cornell professor emeritus Barry Strauss is what I like to call a “no-frills” historian. By “no frills,” I mean without capital-T Theories: though receptive to the latest techniques and discoveries, Strauss mercifully lacks the voguish academic obsession with reading everything through the lens of the latest fixation. His standard for weighing historical evidence and constructing

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  The Frank Meyer-Leo Strauss Correspondence

  Although Leo Strauss (1899–1973) studied political philosophy almost exclusively, he was also interested in practical politics throughout his life. He was a young Zionist, recalling in his 1970 talk “A Giving of Accounts,” “When I was 17, I was converted to Zionism—to simple, straightforward political Zionism.” Later, as a professor at the University of Chicago,

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  Cowboys and Carpetbaggers

  Lonesome Dove, Yellowstone, and the closing of the frontier.

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-28✓ Read

  The Strenuous Game

  In Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet, Dickinson State University professor of history Michael Patrick Cullinane profiles T.R.’s informal circle of advisers—men whose clustering around the president, I would argue, reveals a style of governance both new and ancient. The “Tennis Cabinet” got its name from those advising Roosevelt on matters of government before, after,

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-27✓ Read

  Fall 2026 Correspondence

  Who Failed Schools? I appreciate Mark Bauerlein’s fair-minded summation of my findings in The Cradle of Citizenship (“Saving Civics,” Summer 2026). He and I agree on the failures of progressive pedagogy and the merits of classical schooling. We differ over the relative responsibility of the Left and the Right for the grim state of

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• Claremont Review of Books2026-09-16✓ Read

  Tune In, Drop Out, Start Up

  This article appears in the forthcoming Fall 2026 Claremont Review of Books Because I’m going to be quite critical of Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World, it feels only right to start with three pieces of sincere praise: the book held my attention all the way to the end, I learned things from it, and

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