Murray, Sixty Years On

Murray, Sixty Years On

SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today William Gould John Courtney Murray’s justly celebrated We Hold These Truths, published six decades ago, was written with two distinct but related aims in mind. The first was to establish that Catholicism and...
Murray, Sixty Years On

Murray and 21st-Century Challenges

SymposiumMurray’s We Hold These Truths: 1960 and Today Mary C. Segers Sixty years ago, Sheed & Ward published John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, a now-classic book explaining how and why Roman Catholics...
Maoism Exported

Maoism Exported

Maoism: A Global Historyby Julia Lovell.Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.Hardcover, 610 pages, $37.50. Reviewed by Thomas Albert Howard As if parodying the era’s radical chic, a 1967 issue of Lui magazine (France’s Playboy) included a supplement illustrated with quotes from Mao...
The Towns Brexit Forgets

The Towns Brexit Forgets

Little Platoons: How a Revived One Nation Can Empower England’s Forgotten Towns and Redraw the Political Map By David Skelton. Biteback Publishing, 2019. Paperback, 304 pages, £12.99. Reviewed by Gerard T. Mundy The 2016 popular vote in favor of the United Kingdom’s...
Everyone Worships

Everyone Worships

Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tara Isabella Burton. PublicAffairs, 2020. Hardcover, 279 pages, $28. Reviewed by Scott D. Moringiello Bookman readers are likely to know Tara Isabella Burton from her op-ed in the New York Times entitled...
The Power Has Flowed Away

The Power Has Flowed Away

Serotonin: A Novelby Michel Houellebecq. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $27. Reviewed by Zak Slayback “Did we yield to the illusion of individual freedom, of an open life, of infinite possibilities? It’s possible,” Michel Houellebecq’s...
Hope for a Rebirth of Common Sense in the Academy?

Hope for a Rebirth of Common Sense in the Academy?

Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right Edited by Lee Trepanier and Grant Havers. Lexington Books, Political Theory for Today Series, 2019. Cloth, 202 pages, $95. Reviewed by Stephen B. Presser There’s a famous aphorism often wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde,...
Lessons from a Forgotten Papacy

Lessons from a Forgotten Papacy

The Pearl of Great Price: Pius VI & the Sack of Rome by Christian Browne. Arouca Press, 2020 Paperback, 146 pages, $16.95 Review by David G. Bonagura, Jr. American knowledge of the Roman Catholic papacy does not run deep. It begins in the fifth century with Pope...
The Substance of Style

The Substance of Style

Farnsworth’s Classical English Style by Ward Farnsworth. David R. Godine, 2020 Hardcover, 145 pages, $27.95 Reviewed by Cory L. Andrews Bad and lazy writing, George Orwell famously insisted, betrays bad and lazy thinking. It also burdens and alienates the reader, who...
Defending the Right and the Good

Defending the Right and the Good

Russell Kirk and The University Bookman By George H. Nash In an interview late in his career, Russell Kirk told a story about a “forgotten mill pond” in the village of Mecosta, Michigan. Since boyhood, he recalled, he had enjoyed tossing pebbles into this pond and...