Book Reviews

Deserting the Drug War

by Matthew Harwood October 1, 2021

As you leaf through the first few pages of Dr. Carl L. Hart’s book Drug Use for Grownups, you come across a quote from the writer and social critic James Baldwin. It says: “If you want to get to the heart of the dope problem, legalize it.... a law, in operation, that can only be used against ...

On the Wrong Track

by Lance Lamberton February 1, 2021

Romance of the Rails. Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need by Randal O’Toole (Cato Institute, 2018); 376 pages. If ever there was an example of how government intervention in the marketplace creates unintended consequences and makes a situation it was intended to solve infinitely worse by virtue of being involved in it in the ...

The Roots of Mass Incarceration

by Michael Swanson November 1, 2019

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton (Harvard University Press, 2016), 449 pages. Before the war on the drugs there was the war on crime. In 1975 the police department of Washington, D.C., launched “Operation Sting” in partnership with the FBI and the ...

Gun Ownership: An Individual Right

by Matthew Harwood July 1, 2019

First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History with the Gun by David Harsanyi (Threshold Editions, 2018); 321 pages. In David Harsanyi’s First Freedom, an entertaining jaunt through the gun’s important place in American history, the nationally syndicated columnist notes that the first real attempt to institute gun control was New York’s Sullivan Act. The impetus ...

America’s Legacy of Regime Change

by Stephen Kinzer June 1, 2019

Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War by Lindsey A. O’Rourke (Cornell University Press, 2018); 330 pages. For most of history, seizing another country or territory was a straightforward proposition. You assembled an army and ordered it to invade. Combat determined the victor. The toll in death and suffering was usually horrific, but it was all ...

The Little House on the Prairie of Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Wendy McElroy January 1, 2019

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser (Metropolitan Books, 2017); 625 pages. Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, is one of the finest biographies I have read, and a fully deserving winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Prairie Fires is the definitive depiction ...

The Boomerang Effect

by Matthew Harwood September 1, 2018

Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall (Stanford University Press, 2018); 264 pages. On the evening of July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson turned a protest against police brutality into a bloodbath. Angry at police killings of black men nationwide, the Army reservist and Afghan war ...

Private Government in Genoa

by Lawrence M. Ludlow August 1, 2018

Genoa’s Freedom: Entrepreneurship, Republicanism, and the Spanish Atlantic by Matteo Salonia (Lexington Books, 2017); 214 pages. If the city of Genoa had advertised for security services in the 15th century, the job description might have looked like this: Security-Services Wanted Entrepreneurs in the city of Genoa recently fired the king of France and seek a replacement to provide ...

Freedom’s Frauds

by George Leef August 1, 2018

Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty by James Bovard (Future of Freedom, 2017), 184 pages. James Bovard has been a thorn in the side of the statists for decades. His books and columns have exposed the incompetence, hypocrisy, arrogance, and sheer venality of the American political class much as H.L. Mencken did in the early part ...

The Case against Schooling

by George Leef May 1, 2018

The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan (Princeton University Press, 2018, 395 pages). Almost every book on education policy (and I have read a great many of them) springs from the set of assumptions that education “experts” embrace: that schooling builds our stock of knowledge and ...

Nightfall on the American Empire

by Matthew Harwood April 1, 2018

In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power by Alfred W. McCoy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). In August of 2007, David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States and director of the Government Accountability Office, delivered a speech remarkable for its plainspoken nature to the Federal Midwest Human Resources ...

A Safe Space to Watch a War

by Michael Swanson March 1, 2018

The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (PBS, 2017) DVD. The documentary television event of 2017 was the 10-part PBS series titled The Vietnam War, directed by both Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The series took 10 years and more than $30 million to make. Released last September, it garnered rave reviews all over the ...