On the Fixing of Our Gaze
On Essays and LettersWhen college students go to Europe, as so many do, I tell them to be sure to send me a card from this place or that, places they visit, usually randomly. Moreover, I tell them before they depart that, on coming to Ostia Antica, the port of Rome,...
Hill’s Country
Contrary Country: A Chronicle of Vermont By Ralph Nading Hill. Rinehart & Company cloth, 1950 As a Vermont patriot first and academic second, I begin any professional volume by consulting the index. Is Vermont listed? When I first read Arnold Toynbee’s classic A...Show Me a Statesman
Jim Reed, Senatorial Immortal: A Biography By Lee Meriwether. Kessinger Publishing (Whitefish, Montana) 296 pp., $28.95 paper, 2007 Sen. James Alexander Reed of Missouri was one of the titans of the isolationist, individualist Old Right—though, like others of that...
Dire Straits
Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies by Ginger Strand. Simon & Schuster (New York) 303 pp., $25.00 cloth, 2008 I was in the City of Niagara Falls twice in recent months, both times on business, but I was only lost the first time. It was a wintry night with...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!