No Seed Which Dies Remains Alone
The Locust Years By Paul J. Pastor. Wiseblood Books, 2025. Paperback, 129 pages, $20. Reviewed by Sarah Reardon. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”...
Words from the Hearth
Home Songs By Sarah Reardon. Resource Publications, 2025. Paperback, 46 pages, $6. Reviewed by Annmarie McLaughlin. Sarah Reardon’s Home Songs, a collection of twenty poems about marriage and family life (seven of which were previously published individually), has...
A Knight of the American West
The Last Westerner By Chilton Williamson Jr. St. Augustine’s Press, 2025. Paperback, 386 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Patrick J. Walsh. Apparently, there are still cavaliers and men who believe in love between men and women. Chilton Williamson’s new novel, The...
Coming to Terms with Sherman
Gates of Heaven: A Novel By Glenn Arbery. Wiseblood Books, 2025. Paperback, 554 pages, $20. Reviewed by Chilton Williamson, Jr. Gates of Heaven is Glenn Arbery’s third novel; it is also the last in a trilogy that, reckoning by the publication dates, was a labor that...
Solzhenitsyn and the Spirituality of Self-Limitation
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn. University of Notre Dame Press, 2025. Hardcover, 228 pages, $28. Reviewed by William Scott. The eighth title to appear in Notre Dame Press’s “Center for...
How Should We Think About Inequality?
Why Democracy Needs the Rich By John O. McGinnis. Encounter Books, 2026. Hardcover, 280 pages, $32.99. Reviewed by Michael Munger. Hostility toward wealth is not an American value. But that has changed in the past 15 years, with a culturally salient event being Barack...
Enchanting Criticism: Dana Gioia as Literary Critic
Poetry as Enchantment: And Other Essays By Dana Gioia. Paul Dry Books, 2024. Paperback, 272 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Oliver Spivey. In his essay titled “Reading,” W. H. Auden sets forth what he views as the special duties of the literary critic: What is the function...
The Machine or the Garden?
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity By Paul Kingsnorth. Thesis/Penguin Random House, 2025. Hardcover, 368 pages, $32. Reviewed by Paul Krause. In the beginning was the garden. That is a very standard myth to start. Many cultures have foundation myths that...
What Plato Meant
Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political By Melissa Lane. Princeton University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 480 pages, $49.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. In October of 1993, a trial took place in Colorado regarding Colorado Amendment 2, a ballot measure that...
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