‘It Was the End of Solo Singing’
The Cypresses Believe in God by José María Gironella. Ignatius, [1953] 2005. Paper, 900 pages.When Eric Hobsbawm suggested that the period 1914–1991 could be called “the short twentieth century,” he not only defined an era but separated it from our own. Few conflicts...Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens
The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens by Paul Mariani Simon & Schuster, 2016. Hardcover, 483 pages, $30. When Wallace Stevens was seventy-two, he received the Robert Frost Gold Medal from the Poetry Society of America. In his remarks, he gave an ethical...American Imperialism and Its Discontents
The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire by Stephen Kinzer. Henry Holt, 2017. Hardcover, 306 pages, $28. As the subtitle suggests, this is a book about personality and politics, a group biography with a large cast, including...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...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."