Yearning and Collapsing
Blue Walls Falling Down By Joshua Hren Angelico Press, 2024. Paperback, 436 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by David G. Bonagura, Jr. Can love reconcile America’s partisan divide between left and right, between racially obsessed identity politics and radicalized nativist...
Our Lives in the Panopticon
The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control Jacob Siegel. Henry Holt and Co., 2026. Hardcover, 336 pages, $29.99. Reviewed by Albert Norton, Jr. Just within the last year, Paul Kingsnorth published Against The Machine about the source of our increasing...
Plan a Visit Soon
Pastorals By Rachel Hadas. Measure Press, 2025. Hardcover, 88 pages, $25. Reviewed by Midge Goldberg. What are Rachel Hadas’s pastorals? Not poems, not essays, not quite prose poems. What they really feel like are “visits.” You go to a friend’s house, sit down in the...
Preparing for Leisure
The Leisure Ethic: The End of Work and a Return to Virtue By David Edward Tabachnick. Toronto University Press, 2026. Paperback, 288 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Robert Rich. In August of 2014, the science educator and YouTuber CGP Grey made the case, in a video titled...
Michigan’s Neglected Civil War Governor
Radical of Radicals: Austin Blair—Civil War Governor—In His Own Words By Jack Dempsey. Mission Point Press, 2025. Paperback, 360 pages, $18.95. Reviewed by Miles Smith IV. In every intelligent history of the Civil War Era, the major players show up on stage, right on...
The Enduring Sources of the Permanent Things
What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family By Timothy S. Goeglein with Craig Osten. Fidelis Publishing, 2026. Hardcover, 264 pages, $28.00. Reviewed by Cory Andrews. In an age when so many of our inherited institutions seem to be unraveling...
Talking Classical Education
Classical Catechism Anthony Esolen. Thales Press, 2025. Paperback, 109 pages, $9.99. Reviewed by Sean Hadley. It would be a rather run-of-the-mill comment amongst any group of Christians to state that catechisms play an important role in the life of the Church....
Liberal Education and Its Critics
Liberal Education and Democracy By Bob Pepperman Taylor. Notre Dame Press, 2025. Hardcover, 208 pages, $40. Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl. Ater an even 100 pages, Professor Taylor arrives at the conclusion to his very fine Liberal Education and Democracy. It reads...
Poetry of Transcendence
Killing Orpheus By Forester McClatchey. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2026. Paperback, 88 pages, $20. Reviewed by Camilo Peralta. Might a revival of our degraded culture, or at least its verse, be possible? A recent collection titled Killing Orpheus from Forester...
"In an age when so many of our inherited institutions seem to be unraveling under the pressures of a restless, self-regarding individualism, it is a rare and welcome thing to encounter a book that speaks with quiet conviction about the things that have long sustained the American
"If classical teachers believe that truth, beauty, and goodness can indeed change the world, then the sort of student (and teacher and school) described by @AnthonyEsolen is a net gain for this world. And his Classical Catechism serves as a helpful tool in building the necessary