The Ever-Living Progressive Constitution—From Questionable Doctrine to Article of Faith
America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By By Akhil Reed Amar. Basic Books, 2012. Hardcover, 640 pages, $30. Yale Law School’s Akhil Reed Amar is a very intelligent man. He also is a man committed to a particular ideology of the...Thinking Like Edmund Burke?
The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence. By David Bromwich. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 512 pages, $40. This first installment of a two-volume intellectual biography of Burke is...A Marvelous Tale
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $28. J. R. R. Tolkien’s newly published translation of Beowulf will be of interest to two overlapping groups: on the one hand,...Progressives and the Booboisie
The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class by Fred Siegel. Encounter Books, 2014. Hardcover, 240 pages, $24.What do H. L. Mencken and Barack Obama have in common? Not much, it would seem. The sage of Baltimore was skeptical of all...Books in Little
The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government by Philip K. Howard. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. 257 pages, $24. It is obvious that the current system of government is failing—higher expenses, increased waste, and little (if any)...Elizabeth Lambert
Elizabeth Lambert is Emerita Professor of English, Gettysburg College. She has published reviews and articles on various aspects of Burke’s life and thought, his religion, his friendship with Samuel Johnson, and the ways James Boswell’s portrayal of Burke in the Life...Steven Millies
Steven P. Millies is associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina Aiken in Aiken, SC. He studied at The Catholic University of America, where he wrote on religion in Burke’s political thought. Today, he writes both about conservatism...Michael Brown
Dr. Michael Brown holds a Chair in Irish, Scottish and Enlightenment History at the University of Aberdeen where he is also acting director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. The author of biographical studies of Francis Hutcheson and John...American Religious Freedom: The Revised Story
The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom by Steven D. Smith. Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 240 pages, $40. In legal scholarship, as in any literature, style matters as much as content. The subjects authors explore, their manners and patterns of...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!