The Beauty of an Integrated Life

The Beauty of an Integrated Life

By Bruce P. Frohnen Like many of his friends, I met Gerald Russello only a few times in person. We spoke only a few times by phone and exchanged emails only on occasion. But he was always an important part of my life. As a kind, judicious, and imaginative editor, a...
Gerald Russello, Legal Humanist

Gerald Russello, Legal Humanist

By Glen Sproviero A few years back, I was standing on a packed southbound 1 train in lower Manhattan when I noticed a fellow commuter glancing through the latest edition of The New Criterion.  Looking for an icebreaker, I teased that while I had significant respect...
The Law’s Good Servant, but God’s First

The Law’s Good Servant, but God’s First

By David G. Bonagura, Jr. “But he performed an even greater task, that union of reason with faith that is the mark of a Christian scholar.” So wrote Gerald J. Russello, then 27 years of age, about Christopher Dawson, the eminent Catholic historian, in his...
Lunch Man: A Remembrance of Gerald Russello

Lunch Man: A Remembrance of Gerald Russello

By Jack Fowler There were many, hundreds upon hundreds, of emails that catalogued 15 years of friendship and low-grade skullduggery with Gerald Joseph Russello, a.k.a. Jerry. Or was it “Gerry?” Because in all of those years he never once signed off his missives with...
Joseph Kennedy, American Fascist

Joseph Kennedy, American Fascist

The Ambassador: Joseph P. Kennedy at the Court of St. James 1938–1940 by Susan Ronald. St. Martin’s Press, 2021. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30. Reviewed by Carl Rollyson In this meticulous, relentless biography, Joseph P. Kennedy is now firmly established in the annals of...
The Jeffersonian Judge

The Jeffersonian Judge

Irreconcilable Founders: Spencer Roane, John Marshall, and the Nature of America’s Constitutional Republic By David Johnson. LSU Press, 2021 Hardcover, 256 pages, $45. Reviewed by John Grove There is nothing new under the sun, and that certainly applies to modern-day...
Beyond Black and White

Beyond Black and White

The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright. Library of America, 2021. Hardcover, 240 pages, $23. Reviewed by James E. Hartley Richard Wright’s most recently published novel is a cause célèbre. The Man Who Lived Underground, originally written in 1941, was...
The Last Honest Pagan

The Last Honest Pagan

Far from Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer. University of Texas Press, 2021 Hardcover, 152 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Scott Beauchamp “The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization he had discovered...
Geopolitics in a Godless Age

Geopolitics in a Godless Age

Political Theology of International Order by William Bain. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 272 pages, $85. Reviewed by John Ehrett Few academic fields today feel more unabashedly secular than international relations. Traditionally, the major division in the...
Jeanne Demessieux: A Great Organist’s Centenary

Jeanne Demessieux: A Great Organist’s Centenary

By Robert James Stove What makes organists tick? Denis Arnold (1926–1986), British biographer of Bach and Monteverdi, thought that he knew. In 1983 he remarked: “Organists have to be neat men: their mistakes do not, like a doctor’s, quietly die, but are all too...