The Critic as Catalyst
The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987. Edited by Hans Bak. Harvard University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 848 pages, $40. Hans Bak rightly calls Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) the “chronicler of the lost generation.” His pioneering literary history,...What We’re Reading (Summer 2014)
From medieval sagas to anti-Communist Japanese surrealist novels, the Civil War campaigns to contemporary fiction, our contributors and friends again provide their summer reading lists. Every year this is one of our most popular features, as the suggestions from our...Evangelicals and Conservatives: On Beyond Worldview
The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life by Bradley G. Green. Crossway, 2010. Paperback, 192 pages, $17.The relationship between conservatism in the United States and Protestant evangelicals is puzzling. Historians who study the rise of...The Centennial of a Cataclysm: One Life, One Family
“To you from failing hands we throw The Torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields,” 1915 One hundred summers ago, one of history’s greatest...Today’s Totalitarians
Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It by James Kalb. Angelico Press, 2013. Paperback, 203 pages, $20.In his latest book, James Kalb has produced, among many other things, a phenomenology of the...America’s Aviation Icons
The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight by Winston Groom. National Geographic Press, 2013. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30.The young person at Barnes & Noble who led me to the stack of The Aviators, drew a blank...Paul Elmer More and the Relevance of Life and Letters
Paul Elmer More, once described as the most “patrician” of American critics, together with Harvard professor Irving Babbitt, founded the short-lived Humanist school of criticism. The name they took for themselves alluded to the spirit of the ancient litterae...‘I Think I Have Made Poetry’
The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920 Edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 811 pages, $45. In a conversation with the late literary scholar Peter J. Stanlis about ten years ago, Stanlis...The Problem of Democratic Individualism
By Peter Augustine Lawler From the vantage point of modern liberalism, and especially liberal democracy, America is not without its problems and limitations. The possibility even exists that America’s apparently extreme partisanship on behalf of the individual could...
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!