Subterranean Truths

Subterranean Truths

by | Jul 22, 2012

Lord of the Hollow Dark by Russell Kirk. St. Martin’s Press, 1979. $10.95. The best stories by a living American in what is commonly called the supernatural are by Russell Kirk; notably in his collection The Princess of All Lands, which, despite differences in...

Searching while Blindfolded

by | Jul 21, 2012

Russell Jacoby’s piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on conservative “anti-intellectualism” purports to lament the absence of real conservative intellectuals. Instead, he says, conservatives have abandoned serious thinking and turned to ideology or class...

American Sound—Twentieth Century

by | Jul 15, 2012

Voices of Stone and Steel: The Music of William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter Mennin by Walter Simmons. Scarecrow Press, 2010 Cloth, 438 pages, $70. In his epochal study Voices in the Wilderness (2008), musicologist Walter Simmons charted the careers and...

The Relevance of T. S. Eliot

by | Jul 15, 2012

Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century by Russell Kirk. New York: Random House, 1972. [ISI 2008, 460 pages, paper, $18.] Among all the studies that have been made of the works of T. S. Eliot, too many have been concerned with how...

Founders’ Faith: None of the Above

by | Jul 8, 2012

The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution by Gregg L. Frazer. University Press of Kansas, 2012, 296 pp., $35. The religious views of America’s founders have been fiercely contested in the public arena for many years. The principal...

America Is Hard to See

by | Jul 8, 2012

The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny by Orestes A. Brownson [1865]. Reprinted by Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers: Clifton, New Jersey, 1972.[ISI 2002] It is always a great intellectual experience to examine the operations of a powerful,...

On the Long March of the Wolves through the Sheep-pen

by | Jul 1, 2012

Intellectuals and Society: Revised and Expanded Edition by Thomas Sowell. New York: Basic Books, 2012, 669 pages, $19.99. In her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor promenades a remarkable gallery of grotesques through the life of her protagonist Hazel Motes, a...

personal hell

by | Jul 1, 2012

To live with a gnawing grudge against one’s own civilization is the way to a personal Hell, not to a Terrestrial Paradise.

Many Liberalisms

by | Jul 1, 2012

Against Liberalism, by John Kekes. Cornell University Press, 1997, 287 pp., $30 cloth. Before one can be “against” something, one has to have a fairly clear definition of what that something is. Thus, John Kekes’s new book, Against Liberalism, begins by trying to list...

What We’re Reading (Summer 2012)

by | Jun 27, 2012

The Bookman is a reliable source for books worth reading, thanks in no small part to our reviewers, who cull through the massive numbers of books published to focus on those worth reading, discussing, and digesting. So we have asked some of our regular contributors...