MixedThe Spectator (UK)A brief book that covers a great deal of ground. Yet in only 176 pages, not much can be covered well ... Applebaum is at her best when examining history ... Applebaum’s strongest moments are those where her focus narrows ... Applebaum wants to unite democracies against autocracies, but democracy is meaningless if it isn’t local.
Sohrab Ahmari
PositiveThe Spectator (UK)An easy going, ecumenical, rather cosmopolitan tour of 12 moral questions and select thinkers who responded to each of them ... Ahmari uses ‘she’ and ‘her’ where English would traditionally use masculine pronouns for instances of unspecified sex, and the sins of racism, sexism, colonialism and consumerism come in for as much execration here as in any trendy tome of Critical Race Theory or gender studies. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin stands alongside Confucius, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the pantheon of moral sages Ahmari has assembled ... Sohrab Ahmari introduces a generation (and more) to the spiritual patrimony of which they have been robbed. And he does it in the gentlest way possible, knowing that its riches may dazzle eyes that have too long alighted on only the rusted scrap of utilitarian liberalism.
Mark Lilla
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewTaken together they have new force, sketching a cast of mind that has shadowed European thought for a century, and one that may seem disturbingly familiar to students of American politics today ... Lilla’s chapters are as compact and elegant as they are erudite ... The second half of Lilla’s book explores recent reactionary thought on both sides of the Atlantic, on the political left as well as the right ... His book is a spur to self-critique instead. By studying reactionary thought, the centrist or progressive — and the conservative as well — can learn something about his own failings, if not their remedy.
