The Fragility of Peace
Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World by Adrian Goldsworthy. Yale University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 528 pages, $32.50. Historians, journalists, and amateur commentators over the last century have found in the Roman Empire a ready-made comparison for...Is a Christian Society Possible?
Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society by R. R. Reno. Regnery, 2016. Hardcover, 256 pages, $28. In late February, 1943, C. S. Lewis delivered a series of three evening lectures at the King’s College, Newcastle, that later became the book titled The...The Dread Beneath
The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles to Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond by Peter J. Beck. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Paper, 408 pages, $30. No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being...Watching Shadows
Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature by Hugh Kenner. Dalkey Archive Press, 2016 (Originally McDowell, Oblensky: 1958). Paper, 302 pages, $18.Remember the literature anthology? A brick of onion-thin pages so immense it could ballast a book bag for a day’s worth of...Solidarity Against the Present Discontent
The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Legutko, with a foreword by John O’Sullivan. Encounter Books, 2016. Hardcover, 182 pages, $24. The Polish philosopher, and sometime politician, Ryszard Legutko, has written a book of...
Epic, Rock, Camp, and Beowulf
Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage by Jason Craig and Dave Malloy. Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, RI. Run: September 8–October 9, 2016. America lacks a national epic that helps to define our national identity. In English we inherited from the British two...A Nearly Essential Goethe
The Essential Goethe by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, edited and introduced by Matthew Bell. Princeton University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 1056 pages, $40. What other writer in the history of the world, not just Germany, has covered as much territory in his writing as...The Last Pratchett
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
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...
Our critic’s pick: “On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776,” by Russell Kirk (Creed & Culture). @C_and_C_Books @JamesPanero
https://newcriterion.com/dispatch/the-critics-notebook-112/#1
@newcriterion @C_and_C_Books @JamesPanero You may sign up for the @ubookman discussion of Russell Kirk’s On America here: