Life During Wartime
To Go On Living: Stories By Narine Abgaryan. Plough, 2025. Hardcover, 220 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Michial Farmer. Modern Westerners live with a delusion. We actually live with a lot of delusions, but perhaps the most insidious one is that the normal condition of...
The Triumph of Love
Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature By Paul Krause. Stone Tower Press, 2024. Paperback, 227 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. Roman Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece Chinatown is not only a classic of film noir, but it is also one of the greatest...
Understanding the Rest of Hemingway’s Iceberg
Hemingway’s Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction By John Beall. Louisiana State University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 310 pages, $50. Reviewed by Sean C. Hadley. In Brad Paisley’s 2005 hit song, “Alcohol,” the country musician sings about the praises and...
The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien
The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien: Three-Volume Box Set By J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond. William Morrow, 2024. Hardcover, 1728 pages, $125. Reviewed by Michael Lucchese. J.R.R. Tolkien surely ranks among the greatest novelists...
Catholic Zen
Person Means Relation By David Walsh. St. Augustine’s Press, 2024. Paperback, 110 pages, $16. Reviewed by Robert Grant Price. Those familiar with the writing of personalist philosopher David Walsh know that he’s densely aphoristic. Large tracts of his works, notably...
Outlining Sanity in the Garden
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening: Cultivating Tomatoes, Greens, Peas, Beans, Squash, Joy, and Serenity By Carol Deppe. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015. Paperback, 288 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Eric Scheske. American gardening literature is a big thing. Amazon has an...
Holy Living After the Fall
After Christendom By Michael Warren Davis. Sophia Institute Press, 2024. Paperback, 213 pages, $17.89. Reviewed by Thomas Banks. This is a fairly simple book—part polemic and part spiritual manual. Mr. Davis, its author, is best known for his previous work, The...
Frontier Fiction at Its Best
The Cannibal Owl By Aaron Gwyn. Belle Point Press, 2025. Paperback, 80 pages, $15.95. Reviewed by Daniel Cowper. The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn, is a novella about Levi English, a boy on the Texas frontier of the 1820s who grows up among a band of Comanche. It is...
The Dangers of Modern Nationalism
A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900 By Carlton J. H. Hayes. Harper Collins, 1941. Reviewed by John Rossi. When I started teaching an introductory European History course over 60 years ago, I chose as my textbook Carlton Hayes’s two volume A Political and Cultural...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!