Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

by | Jul 30, 2012

The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans, by Lawrence N. Powell. Harvard University Press, 2012. Cloth, 448 pages, $30. The city of New Orleans has long had a firm grip on the imagination of Americans (a grip that existed long before the round-the-clock news...

Mistaken Identities

by | Jul 30, 2012

America’s British Culture by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers, 1993. Cloth, 150 pages, $25.The “identity crisis” is a relatively recent development of human psychology. Most people in history were what they were, and they didn’t bother overmuch to wonder what that...

Union and Liberty

by | Jul 22, 2012

May the Road Rise Up to Meet You by Peter Troy. Doubleday, 2012, 400 pp., $27. “How you know whachu stitchin when it don’ look like nothing but a buncha threads ain’ got nothing t’do wit each otha?” asks the ten-year-old slave Mary as she watches her fellow slave and...
Subterranean Truths

Subterranean Truths

by | Jul 22, 2012

Lord of the Hollow Dark by Russell Kirk. St. Martin’s Press, 1979. $10.95. The best stories by a living American in what is commonly called the supernatural are by Russell Kirk; notably in his collection The Princess of All Lands, which, despite differences in...

Searching while Blindfolded

by | Jul 21, 2012

Russell Jacoby’s piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on conservative “anti-intellectualism” purports to lament the absence of real conservative intellectuals. Instead, he says, conservatives have abandoned serious thinking and turned to ideology or class...