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...Morality and Order
Redeeming the Time by Russell Kirk, ed. Jeffrey O. Nelson. Wilmington, ISI Books, 1996. Cloth, 321 pages, $24.95.Russell Kirk’s Redeeming the Time was published posthumously in 1996. And as its title suggests, it is a book about thinking and acting in light of moral...Churchill After the War
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid. Little Brown and Company, 2012. Hardcover, 1182 pages, $40. At the end of The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his history of the Second World War,...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."