A University Lecture
The Regensburg Lecture by James V. Schall, S.J. St. Augustine’s Press (South Bend, Ind.), 174 pp., $20 cloth, 2007“The bravest act of our time is the act that insists, in a public university lecture, that what is unreasonable must defend itself in reason.” It should...
Chicago and a New Schema for the Liberal Arts
Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America by Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago Press (Chicago), 299 pp., $39.00 cloth, 2006; $19.00 paper, 2007 Donald N. Levine has lived most of his life at the University of Chicago. He earned his three...
To Serve with Honor
Maurras, Le Chaos et l’Ordre by Stéphane Giocanti. Flammarion (Paris), 575 pp., $39.46 paper, 2006Stéphane Giocanti quotes Colonel Rémy, one of the heroes of the French Resistance and a close compagnon of General de Gaulle, saying that if he had joined the Allied and...
The Witness Revisited
Whittaker Chambers and American ConservatismIt is now 46 years since the death of Whittaker Chambers. His name is still iconic for many conservatives and a catalyst for boiling resentment among left-liberals. In those who know the full story of the Hiss case, and...
The Presence of a Teacher
A Path Remembered: The Lives of Gerhart and Lucie Niemeyer by Paul V. Niemeyer. ISI Books (Wilmington, Del.), 402 pp., $40.00 cloth, 2006When, as a graduate student at Notre Dame, I first met Gerhart Niemeyer early in 1970, like many others I knew immediately that he...
Error Has No Rights
Orestes Brownson: American Religious Weathervane by Patrick W. Carey. Wm. B. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Mich.), 2004. 448 pp., $29.00 paper.Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, predicted that Americans “will tend increasingly to fall into one or the other of...
Sketches of Painterly Lives
The Art of the Art BiographyRecently I met up with an agent to discuss my next book. What about writing a biography of an artist?, he suggested. What about the research?, I responded. As an editor and art critic for a monthly magazine, I just couldn’t see clearing my...
The Man Who Built Ireland
Kevin O’Higgins: Builder of the Irish State by John P. McCarthy. Irish Academic Press (Portland, Ore.), xvi/312 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2006 The subtitle of John P. McCarthy’s new biography of Kevin O’Higgins, “builder of the Irish state,” seems, at first glance, to...
