A Literary Bloodhound Tracks Eliot
Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Hardcover, 493 + xvi pages, $35. As I finished this prodigious tome about “Tom,” a painful question came to mind. What American could have pulled it off? The ideal...Learning What We Don’t Know
The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World by Robert P. Waxler. Bloomsbury, 2014. Paper, 191 pages, $30. I begin with a trigger warning. The following review contains references that could evoke strong feelings about the nature...The Heritage of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Hardcover, 176 pages, $24.Reviewed by Helen AndrewsWhen he set out to interview James Baldwin for his oral history of the civil rights movement, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), Robert Penn...An Old Tale, Retold
Grendel by John Gardner. Vintage, 1971, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, $14. Reviewed by Pedro Blas González Importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite. Expression, however—listen closely now—expression is founded on the finite occasion. John...A Glimpse of Something Lost
America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928 by Booth Tarkington, edited by Jeremy Beer. Front Porch Republic Books, 2015. Paperback, 270 pages, $32. Just prior to this book’s arrival, I had acceded to a friend’s impassioned, insistent...A Certain Cold Grandeur
On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller by Richard Norton Smith. Random House, 2014. Hardcover, 842 pages, $38.Looking back during his final years, Nelson Rockefeller declared his life a failure in that he had not become president of the United States. He had...Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer
Video of a seminar on “Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer” at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature at Michigan State University, June 2, 2015.A panel on “Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer” took place at...Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer
A panel on “Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer” took place at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature on June 2, 2015 at Michigan State University. Jon Lauck was the moderator and presentations were made by Gleaves...Terry Castle: The Anti-Paglia
Helen Andrews Camille Paglia burst onto the scene with Sexual Personae like Marlene Dietrich appearing at the top of the staircase. Who was this woman with the gloriously severe haircut who could put a 700-page book of literary criticism onto the bestseller lists? The...
Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.