Dark Night, Black Hopes

The Death of Christian Culture, by John Senior. Arlington House, Publishers, 1978 [Revised edition, IHS Press, 2008]. Paperback, 192 pages, $29.The last year has brought us a number of books that ought to serve as town criers to the West. While we have had a veritable...
The Enduring Wisdom of Bryce

The Enduring Wisdom of Bryce

The Hindrances to Good Citizenship, by James Bryce. Introduction by Howard G. Schneiderman. Transaction Publishers, 1993. 186 pp., $36. The most revealing fact in James Bryce’s study of the impediments to good citizenship in a democracy, which Howard G. Schneiderman...
The Literary and Southern Schooling of ‘Mad Jack’ Randolph

The Literary and Southern Schooling of ‘Mad Jack’ Randolph

The Education of John Randolph, by Robert Dawidoff. W. W. Norton & Co., 1979. Hardcover, 346 pp., $19.95. A good friend of mine, scion of an old Virginia family, when deep into his cups, regales me with stories of John Randolph of Roanoke. Late into the night,...
The Oral Tradition

The Oral Tradition

Robert Penn Warren Talking: Interviews 1950–1978, edited by Floyd C. Watkins and John T. Hiers. Random House, 1980. Hardcover, 289 pp., $12.95.In the six decades since he began attending meetings of the Fugitive group as a seventeen-year-old Vanderbilt sophomore,...
Solzhenitsyn Interpreted

Solzhenitsyn Interpreted

Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980. Hardcover, 239 pages.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has something important to say to mankind—this is generally conceded, even though there is little agreement on what he has to...
A Poet Aware of the Past

A Poet Aware of the Past

Most Ancient of All Splendors, by Johann Moser. Sophia Institute Press, 1989. Hardcover, 94 pages, $15. It was difficult to believe, until this book arrived at my desk, that in this fin de siècle of computers, word processors, videos, and other robots, poems still are...