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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
"The first question, and perhaps the most pressing one when reviewing a book by @McCormickProf, is this: Even in the comparatively small world of intellectual conservatism, is there anything George isn’t doing?" - R. McKay Stangler in @ubookman
"Nonetheless, admittedly indirect evidence has been put forth, evidence which at least suggests that Hoover might have been inadvertently onto something when he successfully proposed replacing the notion of a relatively quick “panic” with something more drawn out, maybe even