The Fruits of Empire
The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria by Owen White. Harvard University Press, 2021. Hardcover, 336 pages, $39.39. Reviewed by Luke Nicastro Nearly sixty years after the demise of French Algeria, both colonizer and colonized continue to...
Craftsmanship as Social and Political Endeavor
Craft: An American History. by Glenn Adamson. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. Hardcover, 400 pages. $22.50. Reviewed by Clayton Trutor Glenn Adamson’s new book has completely blown my mind. Like so many great works of history, Craft: An American History takes a seemingly...
Robert Lowell’s Selfish Determination
The Dolphin (Two Versions, 1972–1973) by Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, Paperback, ix + 195 pages, $18. The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle edited by Saskia Hamilton. Farrar,...
After Such Knowledge
Sergeant Salinger: A Novel by Jerome Charyn. Bellevue Literary Press, 2021. Hardcover, 288 pages, $28.50. Reviewed by Carl E. Rollyson Biographical novels trouble certain readers. What is true? What is made up? Why isn’t biography enough? Why not just read Salinger,...
The book’s defense of McCarthyism also fares even better over half a century after its publication, as the opening of the Soviet archives gave Americans far more information than the authors had in 1954 and made abundantly clear not only the reality of Soviet infiltration of the…
Today, we know so much more about the communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in his early career. Yet, it turns out that Buckley and his allies were closer to the truth about domestic communism than their…