Visions of Order

The Unwinding: an Inner History of the New America by George Packer. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 448 pages, $27.Liberal journalist George Packer has written a conservative book. At least, I found it to be conservative, at its core. In this “inner...
McConnell Seminar and Video

McConnell Seminar and Video

Dr. Gary L. Gregg, Director of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, brought students from the McConnell Center to the Russell Kirk Center on Labor Day weekend to discuss Russell Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind on the 60th anniversary of its...

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...