On Essays and LettersRecently, a former student, Nicholas Wheeler, knowing my proclivities, gave me Volume CLXXII of “The World’s Classics.” The title of this particular volume is A Book of English Essays (1600-1900). The essays were selected by Stanley V. Makower and...
The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life by Christopher Alexander Center for Environmental Structure (Berkeley, Calif.) 476 pp., $75.00 cloth, 2002 Traditionalists and others complain about...
Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth by David Bentley Hart William B. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Mich.) 448 pp., $36.00 paper, 2003 The Beauty of the Infinite is a complex and subtle work that presents an aesthetic defense of Christian rhetoric...
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins Free Press (New York) 304 pp., $26.00 cloth, 2006 Few things cause more excitement among American evangelicals than the discovery that a well-known actor, athlete, or entertainer is a...
A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century by John Burrow Random House (New York) 540 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2007 The past may be another country, as a cliché holds, but it nonetheless remains...
Why America is Such a Hard Sell: Beyond Pride and Prejudice by Juliana Geran Pilon Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Md.) 280 pp., $26.95 paper, 2007 The question that Juliana Geran Pilon asks in Why America Is Such a Hard Sell is not at all rhetorical. We are the...
Lord Acton, Il Liberalismo Etico Edited By Massimo Baldini. Armando Editore (Rome) 125 pp., $18.53 paper, 2006For several months now Italian bookshops have been selling a priceless collection of the thoughts and sayings of one of the greatest “Catholic Liberals” of...
The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington by Robert Novak. Crown Forum (New York) 662 pp., $29.95 cloth, 2007 If Hollywood is home to “kiss and tell” memoirs, should Washington be the source of the “kiss up and tell” variety? Not if you’re the...
The Conservative Poets: A Contemporary Anthology Edited by William Baer. University of Evansville Press (Evansville, Ind.) 182 pp., $20.00 cloth, 2006.When you put fifteen important poets (most of them teachers and prolific publishers of poetry, prose, and criticism)...
Although I do not particularly admire the criticism of Harold Bloom, his Freudian theory that ambitious authors want to “kill” their strong literary predecessors is getting a lot of empirical support these days from British fantasy writers, first from Phillip Pullman,...
Principle and Pragmatism in Law---Cary Federman on @AlanDersh's "The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms While Preserving Essential Liberties" @EncounterBooks
