A Fine Closet of Curiosities

In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Norton, 2015. Hardcover, 352 pages, $27.Reading Sir Thomas Browne’s unique prose reminds me of walking through the Pitt Rivers Museum in...

Doing Justice to Complexity

Coleridge and the Conservative Imagination by Alan P. R. Gregory. Mercer University Press, 2003. Hardcover, 300 pages, $35.50. “From a popular philosophy and a philosophic populace, Good Sense deliver us!” So Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in his Lay Sermons, which...

Ringing the Alarm for Hope

Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World by Charles J. Chaput. Henry Holt and Company, 2017. Hardcover, 288 pages, $26.“If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” So goes a popular bumper sticker displayed by...

Holding on to Hope

Out of the Ashes by Anthony Esolen. Regnery Publishing, 2017. Hardcover, 203 pages, $18. The year was 1974, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was well into his decades-long exile from Mother Russia after having been subjected to the Gulag for possessing the audacity to...

Robert F. Kennedy and Our Times

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye. Random House, 2016. Hardcover, 580 pages, $32.The year 1968 is sometimes invoked in comparison to our current situation. It can serve both as a warning of what serious civil strife looks like in the United...

Searching for the Christian Mind

Liberal Learning and the Great Christian Traditions. Edited by Gary W. Jenkins and Jonathan Yonan. Pickwick Publications, 2015. Paperback, 168 pages, $22. The reality and definition of the “Christian mind” has become rather tenuous. There are different points of...

The Complex War Legacy of FDR

1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History by Jay Winik. Simon & Schuster, 2015. Hardcover, 656 pages, $35.Franklin Roosevelt is generally considered to be a great wartime leader, even by most conservatives. World War II, after all, is often called “the good...

Digital and the Return of the Real

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax. PublicAffairs, 2016. Hardcover, 304 pages, 25. Reviewed by Gracy Olmstead In the popular 2014 film The Hundred-Foot Journey, Indian immigrant Hassan Kadam journeys from his homeland to the French...

A Testament of Faith and Service

Last Testament by Benedict XVI with Peter Seewald, translated by Jacob Phillips. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016. Hardcover, 288 pages, $24.Those who have a close affinity with Pope Benedict XVI often wait eagerly for news of the man who did so much to shape the...

Latin Einstein on the Beach

Ossa Latinitatis Sola, or, The Mere Bones of Latin According to the Thought and System of Reginald by Reginald Thomas Foster and Daniel Patrick McCarthy. Catholic University of America Press, 2016. Paperback, 800 pages, $40.The first time I went to the beach with...