The Virgin and the Dynamo

The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness by Virginia Postrel. HarperCollins (New York), 237 pp. $24.95 cloth, 2003. The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and...

Ernest van den Haag (1914–2002)

In Memoriam With the death of Ernest van den Haag on March 21, 2002, the conservative movement lost one of its most redoubtable intellectual warriors in the decades after World War II. And the University Bookman lost one of its longtime friends and supporters. Like so...

Decline and Fall

At the End of an Age by John Lukacs. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), 240pp., $22.95 cloth, 2002. In his new book, At the End of an Age, historian John Lukacs argues that the Modern Era, which began about five hundred years ago, is rapidly coming to its...

The Reserved Powers of the Tenth Amendment

The Tenth Amendment and State Sovereignty: Constitutional History and Contemporary Issues Edited by Mark R. Killenbeck. Roman & Littlefield and Berkeley Public Policy Press (Lanham, Maryland), 206 pp., $69.00 cloth, $28.95 paper, 2001. TheTenth Amendment can best...

A Touchstone of Eloquence and Wisdom

Creed & Culture: A Touchstone Reader Edited with an introduction by James M. Kushiner. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), xv + 239 pp., $15.00 paper, 2003. “If Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven’s name, is it relevant?—since...

On Not Thinking in Slogans

The American Cause by Russell Kirk. Edited with a new Introduction by Gleaves Whitney. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), xxii, 169 pp., $13.00 paper, 2002. This is a most appropriate time for the appearance of this short book, ably edited by Gleaves Whitney, aide and...

Vile Bodies

USA Today: The Stunning Incoherence of American Civilization by Reid Buckley. P. E. N. Press (North Carolina), 442 pp. + index, $22.95 cloth, 2002. How does one review a book that begins with a chapter entitled, “This Blessed Land,” in which the author...

The Philosopher Poet

Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear by Leon Harold Craig. University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Canada), 406 pp., $29.95 paper, 2001. Of Philosophers and Kings is an unfashionable book in the best sense of the...

Behold the Reign of Man!

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy by Paul Gottfried. University of Missouri Press (Columbia and London) 158 pp., $34.95 cloth, 2002. While shaken by the imbroglio of post-victory Iraq, many American conservatives nevertheless...

A Conversation with Joseph Pearce

In an office just off a busy street in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the Writer-in-Residence at Ave Maria College sits down to his work. This is Joseph Pearce, one of the preeminent writers of Catholic/Christian biography today and co-editor of the bimonthly St. Austin Review....