Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: The White Whale Was Always America
A review of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as a novel about capitalism, manifest destiny, and the American myth of conquest — and why it still reads like prophecy.
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill — One Idea, One Hundred and Sixty Years, Still Not Settled
A review of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — the Harm Principle, individual freedom, and why governments still can’t leave it alone 165 years later.
The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach: The God You Built From the Best Parts of Yourself
A review of Feuerbach’s 1841 argument that God is the outward projection of human nature — and what that costs us. Read at the Heritage Diner blog.
Atom by Lawrence Krauss — You Are Made of Dead Stars, and That Should Change Everything
A review of Lawrence Krauss’s Atom — the biography of an oxygen atom from the Big Bang to life on Earth, and what it means that science, not religion, tells us who we are.
Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche — The Book Where He Burned Down His Own House
A review of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human — the book where he dismantled Wagner, Schopenhauer, and his own Romantic mythology, one aphorism at a time.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Man Knew What He Was Writing About
A review of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment — and why the biography matters as much as the novel. The man lived the darkness before he wrote it.
