A Flawed and Fascinating Man

Diary 1954 by Leopold Tyrmand. Northwestern University Press, 2014. Paperback, 400 pages, $28.A few months ago, a small piece of history arrived in the post. It was a window that allowed us to catch a glimpse of the world of the Polish People’s Republic: Diary 1954,...

Books in Little: Austen’s Catholic Landscapes

Jane Austen and the Reformation: Remembering the Sacred Landscape by Roger E. Moore. Ashgate Publishing Company, 2016. Hardcover, x + 167 pages, $149.95Since Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas appeared in 1975 there has been much written about Miss...

Unwearying Aphorisms

Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts & Twofold Speech by Eva Brann. Paul Dry Books, 2016. Paper, 311 pages, $20.In many ways, our civilization seems weary, lacking a youthful confidence in its principles and promises. Perhaps no institution...

Where Love Lies Corrupt

Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror by Waller R. Newell. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 264 pages, $30. Russell Kirk, writing in Prospects for Conservatives, described what enlightened conservatives know but the tyrant does not: that love...

Against the Tyranny of Feelings

The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism edited by Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow. Templeton Press, 2015. Hardcover, 280 pages, $28.Nearly three decades after Allan Bloom pronounced the “Closing of the American Mind,” Mark...

De Animali Ambulante

On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation by Alexandra Horowitz. New York: Scribner 2011. Paperback, 320 pages, $16.“We walk the same block as dogs yet see different things. We walk alongside rats though each of us lives in the dusk of the other. We walk...

An Adaptable Conservative

Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait by Biancamaria Fontana. Princeton UP, 2016. Hardcover, 296 pages, $35.“You want to repeal Obamacare? I thought you believed in, you know, conserving things.” “I just want to make marriage more relevant to twenty-first-century...
Testimony to a Catholic Existentialist

Testimony to a Catholic Existentialist

Renée Radell: Web of Circumstance by Eleanor Heartney. Predmore Press, 2016. Hardcover, 220 pages, $80. When I was an undergraduate student I had the privilege of working as an assistant to the founder of this journal, Russell Kirk. One of my tasks was helping him to...

Strange Thing: How Camus Wrote ‘The Stranger’

Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic by Alice Kaplan. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hardcover, 288 pages, $26. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote in The Philosophy of Existentialism that Jean-Paul “Sartre’s world is...

Books in Little: End of an Era

This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason by Mark Molesky. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Hardcover, 512 pages, $35. Despite its status as one of history’s most powerful tremors, the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 has barely...