An Evening with the Poet C. P. CavafyOn November 18, 2013 at The Town Hall in New York City, the PEN American Center presented an evening tribute to the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy in celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth. The readers and speakers included the...
Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique by Grant Havers. Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 256 pp., $37. Grant Havers’s study of the Straussian persuasion may be too relentlessly honest to win applause from mainstream...
Rutgers University hosts an online selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources on Burke collected by Frans De Bruyn (slightly dated now, but still useful). Liberty Fund hosts “Further Reflections on the Revolution in France,” an anthology of Burke’s...
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen. New York, NY: Dutton, 2013. Hardcover, 290 pages, $26.95.In his latest book, Tyler Cowen takes up where The Great Stagnation, his penultimate work, left off. If America’s economy...
In Joseph Epstein’s recent book, Essays in Biography, we find a chapter entitled “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.” It is obviously an essay devoted to the great comedian W. C. Fields. I have often wondered: What would happen to me if I did not take Field’s famous...
The Classic Horror Stories by H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Roger Luckhurst. Oxford University Press, 2013. Hardcover, xxxvi + 487 pages, $25. Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890–1937) is, after Poe, the most important and influential American writer of horror fiction. This,...
Capital: A novel by John Lanchester. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012. Hardcover, 527 pages, $27.This sprawling account of a year in the lives of a variety of people connected in some way to a London neighborhood in the period leading up to and into the global...
James Burnham’s The Machiavellians at Seventy. Seventyyears ago, James Burnham, in the middle of his intellectual odyssey from Marxism to conservatism, wrote an insightful and timeless study of politics and the nature of political power in a book entitled The...
How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt. Templeton Press, 2013. Hardcover, 268 pages, $21. The influence of Christianity is noticeably waning throughout the West. As a result, Judeo-Christian tenets and principles that have long been in force are steadily—and...
A paper presented to the biennial meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado, September 28, 2013. by Wilfred M. McClay My title refers, of course, to Oakeshott’s celebrated essay, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation...
To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor
Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress