Against the Tyranny of Feelings

by | Mar 26, 2017

The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism edited by Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow. Templeton Press, 2015. Hardcover, 280 pages, $28.Nearly three decades after Allan Bloom pronounced the “Closing of the American Mind,” Mark...

De Animali Ambulante

by | Mar 26, 2017

On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation by Alexandra Horowitz. New York: Scribner 2011. Paperback, 320 pages, $16.“We walk the same block as dogs yet see different things. We walk alongside rats though each of us lives in the dusk of the other. We walk...

An Adaptable Conservative

by | Mar 26, 2017

Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait by Biancamaria Fontana. Princeton UP, 2016. Hardcover, 296 pages, $35.“You want to repeal Obamacare? I thought you believed in, you know, conserving things.” “I just want to make marriage more relevant to twenty-first-century...
Testimony to a Catholic Existentialist

Testimony to a Catholic Existentialist

by | Mar 19, 2017

Renée Radell: Web of Circumstance by Eleanor Heartney. Predmore Press, 2016. Hardcover, 220 pages, $80. When I was an undergraduate student I had the privilege of working as an assistant to the founder of this journal, Russell Kirk. One of my tasks was helping him to...

Strange Thing: How Camus Wrote ‘The Stranger’

by | Mar 19, 2017

Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic by Alice Kaplan. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hardcover, 288 pages, $26. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote in The Philosophy of Existentialism that Jean-Paul “Sartre’s world is...