Public Seminar: Knights, Heroes, and Patriots—Howard Pyle and the Shaping of the American Moral Imagination
Public Seminar: Knights, Heroes, and Patriots—Howard Pyle and the Shaping of the American Moral Imagination On Saturday, June 20, the Russell Kirk Center will host a day-long public seminar: “Knights, Heroes, and Patriots—Howard Pyle and the Shaping of the American...
Joseph Story and the Politics of the Early Republic
Contending for American Nationhood: Joseph Story and the Debate Over a Federal Common Law By Benjamin Clark. Lexington Books, 2024. Hardcover, 252 pages, $120.00. Reviewed by John G. Grove. The debate over federal common law does not generally fire the imaginations...
Listening to the Law, and Now Speaking It
Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution By Amy Coney Barrett. Sentinel, 2025. Hardcover, 336 pages, $32.00. Reviewed by James V. F. Dickey. Listening to the Law reveals the personal and public-facing perspectives of Supreme Court Justice Amy...
One Man’s Journey to Faith
Taking Religion Seriously By Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 2025. Hardcover, 200 pages, $29.99. Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks. Taking Religion Seriously is a thoughtful, moving, and entertaining account of the author’s decades-long journey toward acceptance of...
Yearning and Collapsing
Blue Walls Falling Down By Joshua Hren Angelico Press, 2024. Paperback, 436 pages, $22.95. Reviewed by David G. Bonagura, Jr. Can love reconcile America’s partisan divide between left and right, between racially obsessed identity politics and radicalized nativist...
Our Lives in the Panopticon
The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control Jacob Siegel. Henry Holt and Co., 2026. Hardcover, 336 pages, $29.99. Reviewed by Albert Norton, Jr. Just within the last year, Paul Kingsnorth published Against The Machine about the source of our increasing...
Plan a Visit Soon
Pastorals By Rachel Hadas. Measure Press, 2025. Hardcover, 88 pages, $25. Reviewed by Midge Goldberg. What are Rachel Hadas’s pastorals? Not poems, not essays, not quite prose poems. What they really feel like are “visits.” You go to a friend’s house, sit down in the...
Preparing for Leisure
The Leisure Ethic: The End of Work and a Return to Virtue By David Edward Tabachnick. Toronto University Press, 2026. Paperback, 288 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Robert Rich. In August of 2014, the science educator and YouTuber CGP Grey made the case, in a video titled...
Michigan’s Neglected Civil War Governor
Radical of Radicals: Austin Blair—Civil War Governor—In His Own Words By Jack Dempsey. Mission Point Press, 2025. Paperback, 360 pages, $18.95. Reviewed by Miles Smith IV. In every intelligent history of the Civil War Era, the major players show up on stage, right on...
Our critic’s pick: “On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776,” by Russell Kirk (Creed & Culture). @C_and_C_Books @JamesPanero
https://newcriterion.com/dispatch/the-critics-notebook-112/#1
@newcriterion @C_and_C_Books @JamesPanero You may sign up for the @ubookman discussion of Russell Kirk’s On America here: