The Prince Redeemed

The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington by Robert Novak. Crown Forum (New York) 662 pp., $29.95 cloth, 2007 If Hollywood is home to “kiss and tell” memoirs, should Washington be the source of the “kiss up and tell” variety? Not if you’re the...

Rhyming the Right

The Conservative Poets: A Contemporary Anthology Edited by William Baer. University of Evansville Press (Evansville, Ind.) 182 pp., $20.00 cloth, 2006.When you put fifteen important poets (most of them teachers and prolific publishers of poetry, prose, and criticism)...

The Non-Human World of China Miéville

Although I do not particularly admire the criticism of Harold Bloom, his Freudian theory that ambitious authors want to “kill” their strong literary predecessors is getting a lot of empirical support these days from British fantasy writers, first from Phillip Pullman,...

Farewells and Looking Ahead

By the time this issue reaches our subscribers, the nation will have chosen its two contending nominees for President. Unfortunately, the current candidates do not seem to have taken to heart the advice suggested by Christopher Layne, whose book, No More Illusions, is...

The Problem with the World is You?

God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get it by Jim Wallis. New York: HarperCollins, 2005, 2006. 432 pages. Nearly a century ago G. K. Chesterton asked “what’s wrong with the world?” His first and last answer was always the same: “I am.” In...