Donald Davidson and the South’s Conservatism
From The Politics of Prudence Leviathan is a Hebrew word signifying “that which gathers itself in folds.” In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea-beast: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes—whom T.S. Eliot calls...
On the Fixing of Our Gaze
On Essays and LettersWhen college students go to Europe, as so many do, I tell them to be sure to send me a card from this place or that, places they visit, usually randomly. Moreover, I tell them before they depart that, on coming to Ostia Antica, the port of Rome,...
Hill’s Country
Contrary Country: A Chronicle of Vermont By Ralph Nading Hill. Rinehart & Company cloth, 1950 As a Vermont patriot first and academic second, I begin any professional volume by consulting the index. Is Vermont listed? When I first read Arnold Toynbee’s classic A...Show Me a Statesman
Jim Reed, Senatorial Immortal: A Biography By Lee Meriwether. Kessinger Publishing (Whitefish, Montana) 296 pp., $28.95 paper, 2007 Sen. James Alexander Reed of Missouri was one of the titans of the isolationist, individualist Old Right—though, like others of that...
Dire Straits
Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies by Ginger Strand. Simon & Schuster (New York) 303 pp., $25.00 cloth, 2008 I was in the City of Niagara Falls twice in recent months, both times on business, but I was only lost the first time. It was a wintry night with...
Northwest Passages
The Canoe and the Saddle By Theodore Winthrop Edited By Paul J. Lindholt University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln) 240 pp., $13.95 paper, 2006 Good Pacific Northwest literature peels back the layers of cant that have accumulated over time about this region and gives...
Stealing Dorothy
‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ and My Fortunate Home by Caleb Stegall If ever an association between a book and state has been stamped on the national consciousness it must be the up-and-down literary-geographical marriage between Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...
Across the Great Divide
Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted: Country Soul in the American South By Barney Hoskyns. Bloomsbury (London) 256 pp., $17.24 paper, second edition, 1998Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown begins, to quote the script, with “the rhythms of funky seventies SOUL...
