Timothy Sandefur's Articles
Politics & Rights, Reviews
The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman
Timothy Sandefur September 6, 2022
Elliot Ackerman’s The Fifth Act may be the first great book about the Afghanistan war. It uses the nauseating surrender of the United States to the Taliban in 2021 as a point of departure for a series of reflections on the irrationality with which the war was waged and the consequences of that irrationality for American culture.
Ayn Rand & Objectivism, Biographies, History
How Isabel Paterson Helped Ayn Rand Find Atlantis
Timothy Sandefur August 19, 2022
Isabel Paterson considered herself the last survivor of a golden age. But she helped bequeath to us a vision of that free world—and not just a vision, but something more precious: a rational intellectual argument for it.
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, by Robert Pierce Forbes
Timothy Sandefur August 19, 2022
Robert Pierce Forbes’s painstaking research into the writing and revision of Notes on the State of Virginia is impressive and valuable. But his conjectures about Thomas Jefferson’s goals in writing those portions of the book that still stain the great man’s reputation only perpetuate the mysteries.
Arts & Culture, Politics & Rights, Reviews
Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America by David E. Bernstein
Timothy Sandefur July 15, 2022
Racism is premised on the false and immoral idea that people’s minds are functions of their ancestry and, consequently, that a person’s accomplishments are less morally relevant than the color of his skin. But George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein shows in Classified that racism contains still another layer of incoherence.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Stories in Paint by Luc Travers and Windows on Humanity: A History of How Art Reflects Our Ideas about Our Lives and World by Sandra Shaw
Timothy Sandefur June 4, 2022
By giving us doorways into a wider world of art and ideas—and doing so without the backing of any major publishing houses—Luc Travers and Sandra Shaw have not only done us all a great service but have testified to the enormous value of art in all our lives.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham
Timothy Sandefur March 24, 2022
Despite occasional oversights, Kevin Birmingham's The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece offers a dramatic and enlightening introduction to the complicated context in which one of literature’s greatest and most horrifying novels was created.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Louis Sullivan’s Idea by Tim Samuelson and Chris Ware
Timothy Sandefur December 16, 2021
Louis H. Sullivan's buildings are the remaining monuments to a genius who gave voice, as no artist had ever done before, to the distinctive achievement of the modern age: the skyscraper. Hopefully, books such as this will help ensure that this master builder is never forgotten.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Law of the Land by Elmer Kelton
Timothy Sandefur November 26, 2021
One reason critics often ignored Elmer Kelton was that his novels celebrate the virtues of integrity, honor, hard work, and bravery, with none of the nihilism or mournfulness that mark other Western authors. “Critics don’t read a Western unless the book is contemptuous of its subject matter,” Kelton once said.
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
A Profile of Hong Kong by Bruce Herschensohn
Timothy Sandefur September 17, 2021
Written in the final days of his life, as Herschensohn learned of the arrests of brave friends, A Profile of Hong Kong was left unfinished, and it ends on a tragic note, with a run-on sentence that reads like a wail of grief.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
O. Henry: 101 Stories, edited by Ben Yagoda
Timothy Sandefur August 11, 2021
The special glow of O. Henry's prose and the magic of his plots show us the world as it should be—and almost bring it within reach.
History, Reviews
Operation Pedestal: The Fleet That Battled to Malta, 1942, by Max Hastings
Timothy Sandefur July 6, 2021
Hundreds of airmen and sailors—mostly young, many only teenagers, many of them civilians—under terrifying circumstances, “redeemed from the brink of disaster one of the most hazardous naval operations of the Second World War.” In expertly recounting their courage and the horrors they faced, Max Hastings has helped ensure the well-deserved immortality of this band of heroes.
History, Politics & Rights, Reviews
The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 by Akhil Reed Amar
Timothy Sandefur June 2, 2021
Americans need a book that will help them better understand the values underlying our early constitutional history—and they need an authoritative and compelling intellectual voice to explain and vindicate the nation’s fundamental law. Sad to say, they will not find those here.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Ibsen’s Kingdom: The Man and His Works by Evert Sprinchorn
Timothy Sandefur May 14, 2021
“One of the most extraordinary features of Ibsen’s works,” Sprinchorn writes, is the way “each play grows out of its predecessor.” By examining them in order, he draws out their weightier elements, combining an acute understanding of theater and a thorough grasp of the political, social, and artistic controversies that set the background for Ibsen’s career.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand
Timothy Sandefur April 13, 2021
Louis Menand is a writer of great gifts, whose 2000 book The Metaphysical Club is a masterpiece of intellectual history. Unfortunately, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War fails to recapture the magic. That’s partly because despite its bulk—880 pages—it’s curiously incomplete.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
Sophocles: Oedipus the King, A New Verse Translation by David Kovacs
Timothy Sandefur March 2, 2021
Oedipus the King has been considered a masterpiece for two and a half millennia. No less a luminary than Aristotle called it the ideal tragedy. But today’s readers are often disturbed by its apparent injustice. How is it fair that the gods consign Oedipus—a genuine hero who strives to avoid committing the sins for which he is damned—to such an awful fate?