Helen Andrews

Aug 29, 2024 | theamericanconservative.com | Benjamin Nathans |Princeton Press |Helen Andrews

Books When Soviet Dissidents Disappoint A new history of the Soviet dissident movement tries to make heroes of an underwhelming lot. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans, Princeton University Press, 816 pages, August 2024Professor Benjamin Nathans thinks Soviet-era dissidents don’t get enough respect in modern Russia.

Aug 27, 2024 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Steven Hayward |David Azerrad |Michael Kochin |Helen Andrews

Over cigars and brandy in the summer of 1941, with the fate of Britain still very much in doubt, Winston Churchill remarked to American war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, “I like a man who grins when he fights.” Anyone who saw Milton Friedman argue couldn’t help but notice his slight but ever-present grin, making him the emblematic happy warrior, even amidst bitter attacks. Partly this arose from his disposition, character, and humility.

Aug 25, 2024 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Michael Barone |Ben Weingarten |Helen Andrews |Michael Kochin |Patrick Collins

“Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavors, the national interest, upon some particular principle upon which they are all agreed.” So wrote Edmund Burke in 1770, in Thoughts on the Cause of the Recent Discontents, his argument against his parliamentary colleagues’ treatment of Britain’s North American colonies. But the rebellious colonists seem not to have looked to Burke for advice.

Aug 25, 2024 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Helen Andrews |Jeremy Rabkin |Christopher Caldwell |Theodore Dalrymple

In the history of American race relations, discrete decades of upheaval—such as the 1870s, 1910s, or 1960s—have marked the transition from one national racial bargain to another. Race relations during the long stretches of relative tranquility that followed each disruption, however, were not necessarily better, and could often be worse than what had come before.

Aug 25, 2024 | claremontreviewofbooks.com | Douglas A. Jeffrey |Helen Andrews |William Voegeli |Patrick Collins

With The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, Adam Shatz, U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, has written a generally excellent biography—already named a best book of the year by The New York Times and The New Yorker—though sometimes he is a little naïve or even wrongheaded.