Category Archives: Book Review

Aleksandr Pushkin

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

I have a little porcelain statue of Pushkin I bought at an antique shop in Yerevan, featuring a young curly-headed Aleksandr with a plume pen writing upon a round table. It is from the Soviet period, made in the Lemonosov … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 2 Comments

Kaplan on Order

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

Continuing on, adding some thoughts here about “The Tragic Mind” by Robert D. Kaplan, the issue of order continues to weigh on me. When I was a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, and before, I was part of … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review, International Affairs | Tagged | Leave a comment

Robert D. Kaplan’s “The Tragic Mind”

Posted on January 27, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

This short book is one of Kaplan’s most personal. Kaplan has been a foreign correspondent and has written many books about the struggles of politics under the tyranny of geography in faraway places. Unlike most of his other works, “The … Continue reading →

Posted in America, Book Review | Tagged | 1 Comment

On Conservative Reaction

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

It’s hard for me to imagine the excitement people must have felt when they first got their hands on John Locke’s “First and Second Treatises of Government”. Emerging from tyranny, the wickedness of a vile nobility, absolute monarchy, the horrible … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 2 Comments

On “Gulag Archipelago”

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

Most writers have one masterpiece. Everything else that they do is leading up to, or trying to explain, their one great work. A flash of brilliance. It is also likely that the work is not the one they themselves identify … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 4 Comments

Did China Discover America?

Posted on January 21, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

We are all living in a narrow interglacial period of an ice age which has been going on for more than 2,000,000 years. In all likelihood, another glacial period is just around the corner and the frenetic fixation on “global … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 4 Comments

When We Cease To Understand the World

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

This last year two scientists working on Quantum Mechanics won the Nobel Prize. Quantum Mechanics was invented by Heisenberg as part of his “uncertainty principle”. It is a bizarre field. How is it possible that, at the quantum level, the … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 3 Comments

Mud and Stars (or maybe ‘A liberal in Russia’?)

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

Sara Wheeler’s book about Russian writers could have been great. She is a good writer, when she can get out of her own way, and clearly knows the subject matter well. In this book, Wheeler takes the reader on a … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | Leave a comment

Was There A Pre-Flood Civilization?

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Joel D. Hirst

About 2,400,000 years ago the earth entered into an ice age. This ice age is likely still going on, there having been at least 17 interglacial periods which represented a warming of the planet, a receding of the ice caps, … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 6 Comments

The Indo-Europeans

Posted on December 28, 2022 by Joel D. Hirst

Philology is the study of languages, their etymology and development and history. It is a sort of linguistic archeological anthropology; and while everyday anthropology is sort of an act of accident (you stumble upon something buried in a hole), philology … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Review | Tagged | 4 Comments