The Achievement of Irving Babbitt

by | Dec 5, 2011

To define Irving Babbitt’s central view of life, from which radiate all his other views—of letters, of education, of society—I commence by quoting not his own words, but those of a different writer—one whom he would not have approved. For in reading Bertrand Russell’s...

Appealing to Burke’s Moral Imagination

by | Nov 27, 2011

Edmund Burke For Our Time: Moral Imagination, Meaning, and Politics by William F. Byrne Northern Illinois University Press (DeKalb, Illinois). 227 pages, $40.00, cloth, 2011.Does the world need yet one more book on the social and political thought of Edmund Burke...

Hemingway in Perspective

by | Nov 25, 2011

Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 by Paul Hendrickson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, 531 pp.Ernest Hemingway is to twentieth-century literature what Humphrey Bogart was to the same century’s cinema. More than any other actor, one need not...

Herbert Hoover, Revisionist

by | Nov 21, 2011

Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. Edited and with an introduction by George H. Nash. Hoover Institution Press, 2011. 957 pp. $40.95. Herbert Hoover has always been in danger of falling down the memory hole. He...

Lewis’s Aeneid, Labor Amoris

by | Nov 20, 2011

C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile translated by C. S. Lewis; edited by A. T. Reyes. Yale University Press, 2011. Hardcover, 184 pages, $28.Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one who attempts to employ his own...