Reviews
Short stack
Three short reviews.
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Gradyon Carter (Penguin, 2025).
Untamed Unicorns: Why Startup Finance is Broken and How to Fix It by Renée M. Jones (Harvard, 2026).
A Giant in the Field
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian by Emile Chabal (Belknap Press, 2026)
The importance of criticism in the development of a writer: sharpen your skills, read and write reviews
Far from being irrelevant to the pursuit of personal ambition, criticism is a proving ground for thinkers and writers. It has been formative for generations of intellectuals.
A Fraternity of the Furnace
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One by Timothy Larsen (Oxford University Press, 2025)
Sticks and Stones, Silk and Ink
Elizabeth Stice reviews The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood by William Whyte (Harvard University Press, 2026)
Technopoly on line one
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska (Crown Currency, 2025)
Common Sense and the Common Good
Elizabeth Stice reviews Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America by Chris Murphy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026)
Reasonable: you know it when you see it?
Elizabeth Stice reviews Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue by Krista Lawlor (Harvard University Press, 2026)
Maintenance and the Making of Civilization
Elizabeth Stice reviews Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand (Stripe Press, 2025)
Don’t get too loose with it
Elizabeth Stice reviews Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein (Riverhead Books, 2026)
Apples, America, and Adulthood
Elizabeth Stice reviews American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald (Knopf, 2026)
To signal or not to signal? Putting up the anti-AI sign (or not)
The anti-AI sign: is it virtue signaling or something else? We look to Václav Havel for help.
With liberty and independence for all?
Elizabeth Stice reviews Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal by Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
A Window Onto Grief
Elizabeth Stice reviews Windower by Michael Loughran (Ohio State University Press, 2025)
As Entrancing as Snowy Egret Feathers
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds by James H. McCommons (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)
Analog Intelligence
Elizabeth Stice reviews The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future by Joel J. Miller (Prometheus Books, 2025)
A Boys’ Own Forgotten Front of World War I
Elizabeth Stice reviews Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One by Nick Higham (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Getting Beyond Grit
Elizabeth Stice reviews Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans by Robert J. Sampson (Harvard University Press, 2026)
From the Stacks: Islands and Beaches
From the Stacks: Elizabeth Stice explains what is great about Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a silent land: Marquesas 1774-1880 by Greg Dening (The Dorsey Press, 1980)
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