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Tolstoy comes across as a standard mid to late nineteenth century “enlightened” one. Someone who thinks that they, not the Church nor the trove of historical Christian teaching or Scriptural understanding, actually understands Jesus and the Gospel. You can suffer through this trite to get an idea of what Russia was like prior to the Bolsheviks, and how the stage was truly set for the gulags.

Possibly the first example of a clickbait title. This is a WORLD history, NOT just for the west. Many preconceptions/expectations about this book, but did not expect 200 pages of speculating on art, music, and ethics. Disappointed.

This book is so scattered it’s hard to read. Within 2 pages the author has gone from discussing China’s abuse of the global market, to the 2020 Democratic primaries, to the state of the current ruin that is California. There needs to be a better flow.

Terrible, boomer necon taking points.

“Once a man owes more loyalty to his first cousin than to a fellow citizen, a constitutional republic cannot exist” (pg. 16)
But a man SHOULD owe more loyalty to his family rather than a random citizen! Is this a joke?

“I believe we are lost”

Liberalism is based on a twisting of the classical definition of liberty. Rather than being defined as the freedom from vice in order to pursue the virtuous life, it becomes freedom from any sort of control or restriction.

This leads to the paradoxical result we find ourselves in: in order to have a perfectly free man from all authority, we need a massive authority in the state to remove all other authority.

“A corrupt generation necessarily begets a revolutionary generation”

“If man thinks what he pleases then he will do as he pleases”

Ireland isn’t the focus until page 70 of a 214 page book.

Plays fast and loose with the history, to mostly entertaining results. However, it is replete with outright character assassinations of figures the author doesn’t fully approve of (Augustine and Cicero e.g.), as well as trite and obvious anti-Catholicism.

It’s not great