Waltharius and the Epic Quest for Epic Poetry

Waltharius edited and translated by Abram Ring. Peeters, 2016. Paperback, 198 pages, $63. A. M. JUSTER Western literature begins with greatness on a grand scale. Homer’s magnificent epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, created the framework and the impetus for...

Political Thinking from the Hillbilly Thomist

A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor edited by Henry T. Edmonson III. The University Press of Kentucky, 2017. Hardcover, 398 pages, $60. Reviewed by KARL C. SCHAFFENBURG This volume represents the latest addition to an ongoing series from the University Press of...

To Hear a Baby Crying

Water at the Roots: Poems and Insights of a Visionary Farmer by Philip Britts. Plough Publishing House, 2018. Paperback, 179 pages, $16. JAKE MEADOR On Christmas Day 1914, roughly 100,000 British, French, and German soldiers fighting along the western front of World...

A New, Old Way to Learn Latin

Learning Latin the Ancient Way: Latin Textbooks from the Ancient World by Eleanor Dickey. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Softcover, 197 pages, $30. DAVID G. BONAGURA, JR. In perhaps the wittiest satire of Latin teaching ever performed, the title character of Monty...

Keeper of the Cosmopolitan Flame

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey Stewart. Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 932 pages, $30. Gilbert NMO Morris One gets the sense, not even halfway through Jeffrey Stewart’s epochal biography of Alain Locke, that Locke touched aspects of one’s...

What Popper Saw in Churchill

The Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty: A View from Europe by João Carlos Espada. Routledge, 2016. Hardcover, 212 pages, $149.95. DANIEL J. MAHONEY The Portuguese political theorist João Espada has written a most thoughtful and instructive book on the political and...

The Unwritten Constitution Today

Constitutional Morality and the Rise of the Quasi-Law by Bruce P. Frohnen and George W. Carey. Harvard University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 304 pages, $45. TED MCALLISTER One of the most serious questions of our time is whether the rise of the regulatory state has...
A Quiet American in Vietnam

A Quiet American in Vietnam

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot. Liveright Publishing, 2018. Hardcover, 715 pages, $35. JOHN C. CHALBERG In this massive biography of Colonel Edward Lansdale, biographer Max Boot has given us the story of a quiet...
Tomboys and Magic

Tomboys and Magic

The creepy-cozy tales of John Bellairs. Eve Tushnet Children fell in love with the tales of John Bellairs (1938–1991) because they perfectly combined creepy and cozy: the laughing skeleton, curled up by the fire with a mug of cider. In novels like The Curse of the...

Patiently Learning to Belong

Port William Novels & Stories: The Civil War to World War II by Wendell Berry. Library of America, 2018. Hardcover, 1018 pages, $40. This January, the Library of America released its first volume of Wendell Berry’s writings, Port William Novels & Stories (The...