Reading Sowell in the Badlands

by | Feb 28, 2016

Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective by Thomas Sowell. Basic Books, 2015. Hardcover, 244 pages plus notes and index, $30. Last summer, after more than two decades in Northern Virginia, I moved with my family to Germantown in northwest...

Rabelais in the Graveyard

by | Feb 28, 2016

Graveyard Clay (Cré na Cille): A Narrative in Ten Interludes by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, translated by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson. Yale University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 368 pp., $25.Last year around this same time, an edition of this Irish novel appeared in...

A Memorial Wall of Words

by | Feb 21, 2016

Oblivion by Sergei Lebedev, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New Vessel Press, 2016 Paper, 290 pages. $16. “This text is a memorial,” explains the first person narrator in Oblivion, the new and at times stunning novel by the young Russian writer Sergei Lebedev, “a...

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016)

by | Feb 14, 2016

An era ended today with the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia, a 1960 magna cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School and a Notes Editor for the Harvard Law Review, taught for a while both at the University of Virginia and at the University of Chicago,...

At Long Last

by | Feb 8, 2016

The Poems of T. S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 2 volumes, 1344 + 688 pages, $45/$40. When T. S. Eliot died in 1965, his writings were left in the care of his young widow, Valerie Eliot. She proved...