Can You Hear Me Now?

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Broadway/Random House, 2013. Paper, 368 pages, $16. In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain seeks to create a revolution, and after reading her...

Another Epitaph on American Exceptionalism

Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century by Patrick Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 231 pages, $27.50. This slender volume consists of four essays offering four variations on a single theme. Since “the American century is behind...

Books in Little

Theodore Dalrymple, Farewell Fear (New English Review Press, 2012, 238 pp.) In his most recent book, English essayist Theodore Dalrymple covers a wide range of cultural topics, from good-natured folks who love hedgehogs to personal ads that prompt unrealistic romantic...

Characterizing the Two Britains

Sea Changes by Derek Turner. Washington Summit Publishers, 2012. Paperback, 456 pages, $23. “And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. In another second Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the...

Reading C. S. Lewis from the Inside Out

C. S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet by Alister McGrath. Tyndale, 2013. Hardcover, 488 pages, $24. Fifty years after his death, the Irish born but British bred scholar, apologist, and novelist C. S. Lewis remains incredibly popular in America, where...

Deinstitutionalizing the Humanities?

So the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report defending the humanities. It wasn’t a very resolute defense, and it seemed somewhat desperate. The result was all kinds of articles that were more about recording than resisting the humanities’ decline and...

Crowding Out Virtues

A conversation with Michael J. Sandel.Michael J. Sandel is a political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his “Justice” course, which he has taught for over two decades. Sandel first came to prominence in 1982 with his book...

The Literary Burke

Patriotism and Public Spirit: Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain, by Ian Crowe. Stanford University Press, 2012. Hardcover, 304 pages, $65. If the never-ending stream of Burke books is a testament to his ongoing relevance and...

Family and Faith: A Two-Way Street

An interview with Mary Eberstadt on How the West Really Lost God.The University Bookman is pleased to present this interview with Mary Eberstadt about her new book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization. Mary is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and...

Rushmore’s Odd Man Out

Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition by Jean M. Yarbrough. University of Kansas Press, 2012. Cloth, 337 pp., $40.Just what is the “American political tradition?” Better than sixty years ago the noted American historian, Richard Hofstadter, tried to...