Tag: Book Reviews

Lane Greene’s Talk on the Wild Side: Why Lan­guage Can’t Be Tamed came across, in its ini­tial read­ing, as a scat­ter­shot col­lec­tion of top­ics relat­ing vague­ly to the way the pro­nun­ci­a­tions, words, and gram­mars of lan­guages will change with time so long as those lan­guages con­tin­ue to live and have peo­ple speak them. What makes the […]

In the Mel Brooks par­o­dy “Space Balls”, the vil­lain­ous char­ac­ter Darth Hel­met brags to Lon­es­tarr, the pro­tag­o­nist, that, “Evil will always tri­umph because good is dumb.” This trope appears in fic­tion often, and some writ­ers rely on it almost entire­ly. The medieval­ist his­to­ri­an and cul­ture crit­ic Steven Atwell has observed that one of the central […]

Read NPI’s review of Alt-Amer­i­ca, local author David Nei­w­ert’s well-researched book about the rise of the rad­i­cal right in the Trump error.

Lawrence Freedman’s “The Future of War: A His­to­ry” is only about the more mar­tial of the two human endeav­ors, but there’s a lot to love in it.

If human­i­ty does­n’t imme­di­ate­ly reduce our emis­sions of car­bon diox­ide, methane, and oth­er cli­­mate-war­m­ing air pol­lu­tants, glob­al tem­per­a­tures could rise by as much as 11.5 degrees Fahren­heit by the end of the cen­tu­ry, accord­ing to the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change’s most pes­simistic fore­casts. For some rea­son, this knowl­edge isn’t as fright­en­ing to us as […]