Overview for Book Reviews

Swann’s Way

One of Proust’s great themes is the transformation of personality across time. Our earlier selves cannot begin to imagine our later selves; our later solves are baffled if not horrified by our earlier selves. Marcel Proust is the writer to whom I have returned most often over my life. Now that …

Written by David Frum on Saturday December 26, 2009

The Inheritance of Rome

Suppose you were born in the year 430 in one of the western provinces of the former Roman Empire – meaning that the overthrow of the last Roman emperor in the West occurred about midway through your life. What would you see and experience if you lived through “the fall of Rome”? I remember a …

Written by David Frum on Monday October 26, 2009

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Chris Caldwell’s new book is at once urgent and subtle, alarming and profound. Caldwell’s subject is Muslim immigration to Europe. But is it really immigration? Immigration implies a departure from one society and acceptance of another. But what if the immigrant refuses to accept his new society’s …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday October 6, 2009

The Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age

To the extent that anybody remembers them at all, the Mugwumps of the 1870s and 1880s get predominantly negative press. Yet while as a movement for political power the Mugwumps failed, their ideas for reform overwhelmingly prevailed. To the extent that anybody remembers them at all, the …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday August 25, 2009

Prince of Darkness

Robert Novak wrote Prince of Darkness (according to his publicity materials) to vindicate himself and to settle scores. Robert Novak wrote em> Prince of Darkness The Right Man

Written by David Frum on Tuesday August 18, 2009

Thomas Hardy's Jude: Not Nearly Obscure Enough

Negative reviews of Jude the Obscure so jolted Thomas Hardy that he left off writing narrative fiction ever after. When this story is usually told, much is made of the supposed squeamishness of Hardy’s Victorian contemporaries. One critic nick-named the novel, “Jude the Obscene.” Negative …

Written by David Frum on Sunday August 16, 2009

A Politics That Will Kill Us

Conservatives famously champion what we call a “culture of life.” But how about a politics that is concerned with ensuring that as many Americans as possible are healthy? Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney often joked during the primaries: “Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday August 11, 2009

Detroit: Then and Now

Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s – the booming home of a glamorous new industry. But, Detroit’s fall was as steep and rapid as its rise. Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s – the booming home of a glamorous new industry, a place where huge fortunes were conjured in years, …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday August 4, 2009

The Discovery of France

Like the United States, France is a melting pot. But while on this side of the Atlantic newcomers came to the United States, on the other it was France that came to the newcomers. For three-quarters of a millennium, the kings of France pursued a policy of determined and generally successful …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday July 14, 2009

The Financier

Imagine an Ayn Rand novel written by a socialist, and you have some idea of the intellectual and moral universe of Theodore Dreiser’s trilogy of novels, The Financier , The Titan and The Stoic . Imagine an Ayn Rand novel written by a socialist, and you have some idea of the intellectual and …

Written by David Frum on Sunday July 12, 2009

How Rome Fell

Over the past three years, three excellent and important new books have been published on the end of the Roman Empire – and by amazing happy coincidence the order in which they were published corresponds exactly to the order in which they should be read. In 2005, the British archaeologist and …

Written by David Frum on Tuesday May 19, 2009

The Woodlanders

“Nothing ever had brought home to her with such force as this death how little acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling personal character.” So thinks young Grace Melbury, as she stands by the grave of her rejected suitor, Giles Winterborne, near the end of Thomas Hardy’…

Written by David Frum on Sunday May 10, 2009

The Rise of Silas Lapham

Silas Lapham, the hero of William Dean Howells’ famous novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham , is a self-made man. Born on a homestead in Vermont, Lapham combines the minerals in his farm’s soil into a specially weather-resistant paint. The paint establishes Lapham’s fortune: He …

Written by David Frum on Sunday April 19, 2009

American Pharaoh

What is it about Illinois? Three governors since 1968 have gone to jail, and a fourth seems headed to join them. The state’s biggest city, Chicago, is a byword for corruption and election-rigging. Until inauguration day 2009, the Chicagoan to have held most power in Washington was …

Written by David Frum on Sunday March 15, 2009

Sick

Jonathan Cohn's em> Sick

Written by David Frum on Monday March 9, 2009

Five Germanies I Have Known

Fritz Stern is truly a great historian. His 1963 book, The Politics of Cultural Despair , brilliantly studies the dangerous intellectual prehistory from which Nazism emerged - shedding light on the haunting question of how the Nazi movement could have captured the loyalties not only of brutes …

Written by David Frum on Thursday February 19, 2009

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State

My column for this weekend's National Post discusses the two most important books on US politics I read this year, Andrew Gelman's em> Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State

Written by David Frum on Thursday February 19, 2009

Kim

Rudyard Kipling's Kim has ranked high on the list of forbidden books for more than half a century. Edward Said's judgment - "a rich and absolutely fascinating, but nevertheless profoundly embarrassing novel" - actually tilts toward the generous side. You can certainly see why the novel …

Written by David Frum on Thursday February 19, 2009

Fathers and Sons

Some weeks ago, I read an article in a newspaper that contained this striking sentence: For the first time in history, teenagers can say to their parents, "You're, like, so lame," and deep down, the parents may wonder whether their kids are right .... The author of that sentence …

Written by David Frum on Thursday February 19, 2009

The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and

In his new book arguing the case for America's coming decline as a world power, Fareed Zakaria makes much of the fact that many of the world's most grandiose pieces of Americana are no longer located in the United States: the world's biggest shopping mall, the world's biggest Ferris wheel, etc. …

Written by David Frum on Thursday February 19, 2009