Cities Alive: Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and the Roots of the New Urban Renaissance by Michael W. Mehaffy. Sustasis Press, 2017. Paperback, $20. Reviewed by Gene Callahan I first encountered the work of the great urban theorist Jane Jacobs due to the...
The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language by John H. McWhorter. Oxford University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 208 pages, $20. Reviewed by Gene Callahan John H. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, and a fascinating and sometimes...
The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller. Princeton University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 220 pages, $25. Reviewed by Gene Callahan One way of defining “rationalism” (when the term is understood as a flaw rather than a virtue) is that it is the attempt to replace...
Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History by Rodney Stark. Templeton Press, 2016. Hardcover, 280 pages, $28. Rodney Stark, while doing research into the history of religion, discovered that the popular history of Catholicism is rife with...
How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem. by Rod Dreher. Regan Arts, 2015. Hardcover, 300 pages. $30.This is a book written in a surge of enthusiasm—in both the original and the modern sense of the word—and it has the virtues...
“The Last God’s Dream,” while certainly among the more daring of Kirk’s “experiments in the moral imagination”(as he described his literary efforts), is also one of the more successful at blending the author’s varied interests in politics, history, literature, and metaphysics.