Encounter with a Real Borges
Borges and Me: An Encounter By Jay Parini. Doubleday, 2020. Hardcover, 320 pages, $27.95 Reviewed by Jerrod A. Laber We’ve all answered the question at some point about those famous individuals, dead or alive, that we would most like to have dinner with if given the...
The Ancient-Modern Quarrel over Tragedy
Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us By Simon Critchley. Vintage Books, 2020. Paperback, 322 pages. $17. Reviewed by Grant Havers The day after the passing of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965, Leo Strauss delivered a philosophical eulogy to his students, contrasting “the...
Thebes Gets Its Due
Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge. Picador Press, 2020. Hardcover, 287 pages, $30. Reviewed by Clayton Trutor Paul Cartledge makes a compelling case for the centrality of the often “forgotten” city of Thebes to the story of Ancient Greece....
Salvation Through Compassion?
Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption by Roger Scruton. Allen Lane, 2020. Hardcover, 208 pages, £20.00 Reviewed by Paul Krause “We have been called not to explore the world, but to rescue it. In doing so we emerge from our trials and conflicts in full possession...
What Literature Makes Happen
E. J. Hutchinson What is literature for? Any number of things, one supposes—pleasure, say, or escape. But does it do anything else? In a frequently used and even more frequently misunderstood phrase, Auden says that “poetry makes nothing happen.”[1] But what if...
Mental Anchors for Information Overload
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs. Penguin Press, 2020. Hardcover, 192 pages, $25. Reviewed by Kevin Holtsberry An old man in an Italian farmhouse muses to his friend: “What brings tranquility? What makes you...
Kierkegaard Is for Lovers
Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard by Clare Carlisle. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Hardback, 339 pages, $30. Reviewed by Asher Gelzer-Govatos It is relatively easy, if perhaps a bit crude, to draw a dividing line between two groups of...
Innovation Through Constraint
How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok. Princeton University Press, 2020. Hardback, xv + 185 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Matthew Stewart Scott Newstok has written a delightful book about modern education in the guise of a Shakespearean analysis. He succeeds in...
Properly Dangerous Ideas
Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction by Chuck Klosterman. Penguin Press, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.00 Chris Butynskyi Ideas are dangerous. Most people would agree that a certain level of danger and harm can take root in ideas. Culture, too, is dangerous....
Editor, @lsheahan, on the @lawliberty podcast with @JohnGGrove1 discussing new edition of Robert Nisbet's classic, The Social Philosophers. @AmPhilSociety Press.
Me, on a new edition of ROBERT NISBET's THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHERS, out with @AmPhilSociety Press, on the @lawliberty Podcast with @JohnGGrove1.
I enjoyed the opportunity to interview @lsheahan for the @LawLiberty Podcast on the new edition of Robert Nisbet's The Social Philosophers. Give it a listen and subscribe at Apple/Spotify etc...