Running About with Lit Matches
“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed,” Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451. “As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over.” Regarding the friendship between Ray Bradbury and Russell Kirk—two writers...
The Pulpy Roots of ‘Fahrenheit 451’
Ray Bradbury (1923–2012) early found his métier in two forms, the short story and the thirty-minute radio drama. Three excellent literary mentors advised and worked with him when he was in his twenties—Catherine L. Moore (1911–1987) and Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) for...The Marilyn Monroe of Modern Literature
An interview with Carl Rollyson.The University Bookman recently sat down with Carl Rollyson, past contributor to our special issue on biography and author of a new biography on the poet Sylvia Plath and of Amy Lowell: A New Biography, forthcoming in September 2013....Eliot’s Politics in Context
Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics, by Leon Surette. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Cloth, xv + 363 pages. $59.95.Some years ago at a conference a speaker mentioned in passing that Eliot had “flirted with fascism.” This comment...Tolerance that Swallows Itself
The Intolerance of Tolerance by D. A. Carson. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012. Cloth, 196 pages, $24.D. A. Carson, a well-known Reformed theologian and exegete, has written a clear and well-reasoned analysis of today’s imperialistic tolerance from an...Debunking the Demographers
What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last. Encounter Books, 2013, Hardcover, 240 pages, $24. Demography can be dull; to call it unimaginative would be to give it too much credit. But then there is Jonathan V....Beyond the End of History: Fukuyama’s Myopic Vision
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 Hardcover, 608 pages, $35. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the “end of history” was realized with the...The Left Bank in the Vieux Carré
Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s by John Shelton Reed, LSU Press, 2012, Hardcover, 320 pp., $38. The popular image of the French Quarter in New Orleans often seems to be one of unrestrained debauchery—particularly around Mardi Gras when it is not...Chronicling the Conservatives
The Conservatives—A History by Robin Harris. London: Bantam Press, 2012, hb., 632pps., £30. Robin Harris brings to his account of the Conservative Party not just impressive erudition but also many years’ inside experience of how the party operates and “feels.” He is a...
The book’s defense of McCarthyism also fares even better over half a century after its publication, as the opening of the Soviet archives gave Americans far more information than the authors had in 1954 and made abundantly clear not only the reality of Soviet infiltration of the…
Today, we know so much more about the communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in his early career. Yet, it turns out that Buckley and his allies were closer to the truth about domestic communism than their…