The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, by Brad S. Gregory The opening of the cover flap to the hardcover edition of this book gets immediately to the heart of it:  Notre Dame professor of early modern European history Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way […]

For years I have been fascinated by the similarities between the Supreme Court decisions in the 1857 Dred Scott case involving slavery and the 1973 Roe v. Wade case involving abortion rights.  My interest to date has been more about the cultural similarities rather than those involving legal and constitutional principles, because I have felt […]

I finally caught up with Philip Bobbitt’s 2009 book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, a follow up to his masterful 2003 work, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, which traced the evolution of warfare from the Italian city-state up to what he calls the modern market […]

I’ll open by saying that, although I always thought he was brilliant and I enjoyed meeting and visiting with him over 30 years ago, I didn’t always agree with Henry Kissinger’s conduct of foreign policy, particularly the notion of detente that he and Richard Nixon practiced in policy with the Soviets.  But his new book, World […]

An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, by Joseph Bottum In the preface to this book, the author opens with the following: “Ours is an anxious age–the Anxious Age, it often seems: a moment more tinged by its spiritual worries than at any time in American since perhaps the 1730s.”  He […]

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief, by George M. Marsden This review and reappraisal of the debates that shaped the country’s post WWII history reveals  that both the left and the right have been unable to provide for religious diversity in public life, a failure that continues […]

Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction by Allen C. Guelzo As with any subject that has been so widely covered as the Civil War, one wonders what else is left to be said, but Guelzo covers not only the major personalities and battles, but also the politics, religion, gender, race, […]

During the Thanksgiving/Christmas holidays I read two books by a very provocative author, Reza Aslan, both of which spent considerable time on the New York Times bestseller list. No god but God This is a very detailed history of Islam and a very good explanation of its major tenets, its origins, and the evolution of […]

Since inception of The Texas Pilgrim almost fourteen years ago, I have reviewed over 100 books and recently my son-in-law asked me to list for him my top ten books, which gave me the idea to publish this special December edition.  To do so, I considered not only those books I have reviewed but essentially […]

  The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark This is an extremely detailed and meticulously researched account of the origins and events leading to the most catastrophic event of the 20th century and one that continues to reverberate in almost every significant foreign policy consideration to the present day.  It […]