The Last Pratchett

by | Sep 21, 2016

The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett. HarperCollins, 2015. Hardcover, 288 pages, $19.An agnostic friend once divided the science fiction novels of Ursula LeGuin into “Good Ursula” and “Bad Ursula”—by which he meant whether or not her didacticism hijacked her story....

Henry George, Anti-Statist

by | Sep 18, 2016

Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age by Edward T. O’Donnell. Columbia University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 376 pages, $38. Historian Edward O’Donnell’s Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality is a fascinating, if...

Lessons from a Failed Party?

by | Sep 11, 2016

John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, & Ardent Nationalist by Andrew R. Black. Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Cloth, 343 pages, $48. Lawyer, professor, statesman, and cabinet official, John Pendleton Kennedy is best remembered...

Backcountry Wisdom from an Investment Banker

by | Sep 9, 2016

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance. Harper, 2016. Hardcover, 264 pages, $28. Whether or not Donald Trump self-destructs on the campaign trail this year, the wave of anger he’s been riding—like the wave enabling the recent...

The Latin Literature that almost Wasn’t

by | Sep 5, 2016

Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature by Denis Feeney. Harvard University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 400 pages, $35.If students of literature and the classics take anything for granted, it is the existence of the texts themselves, be they in the original Latin...

Birzer wins 2016 Paolucci Award

by | Sep 5, 2016

We congratulate Bradley J. Birzer, the 2016 recipient of the Henry and Anne Paolucci Book Award for his biography, Russell Kirk: American Conservative. This annual award from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute honors the best book that advances conservative...

Horror of Life

by | Aug 29, 2016

A conversation with Peter AckroydOver the course of a magisterial career in cinema that lasted six decades, Alfred Hitchcock directed fifty-two feature films. These included such titles as Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho, North By Northwest, Rope, and Strangers on a Train....

A Rebel Against Rebellion

by | Aug 22, 2016

Conversations with Roger Scruton by Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016. Hardcover, 213 pages, $28. Roger Scruton’s (b. 1944) conservatism has scandalized the bulk of the British intellectual community since the 1970s. This thinker and writer’s...

Books in Little: The Good Old Days of Publishing

by | Aug 19, 2016

Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir by Gail Godwin. Bloomsbury, 2015. Paperback, 224 pages, $16. Gail Godwin, a National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author, provides an insider’s perspective on the tumultuous journey of a career novelist in her latest...

The Art of Robotics

by | Aug 15, 2016

Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson by Gary Lachman. TarcherPerigee, 2016. Paperback, 416 pages, $26. On the heels of Colin Stanley’s anthology of Colin Wilson’s Collected Essays on Philosophers comes the first biography of Wilson since that writer’s...