Academe’s Poisoned Groves
The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done by John M. Ellis. Encounter Books, 2020. Hardcover, $224 pages, $26. Reviewed by Lee Oser The irony of the year 2020 is that our culture is blind. By forsaking the light of...
Ishmael’s Real Name Was Jonah
The Interpretive Key that Allows Us to See Melville’s Work as a Unified Whole By Will Hoyt Like any other card-carrying American I have long believed that Melville wrote only one great work. Moby-Dick is—unquestionably if improbably—the one American novel against...
Discouraging Charity
Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms by Howard A. Husock. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 176 pages $24. Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl It’s a likely sign of the times. On a Tuesday last December, the phone rang with...
The Order that Transcends the Upheavals
The Persistence of Order, Vol. I: Essays on Religion and Culture Edited by Christopher Dawson and T. F. Burns. Cluny Media, 2019. Paperback, 304 pages, $19.95 The Persistence of Order, Vol. II: Essays on Politics and Society Edited by Christopher Dawson and...
‘The Real World Is the World of the Permanent Things’
Bradbury at 100 James E. Person Jr. Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was born one hundred years ago today, August 22. Bradbury was the author of numerous novels and stories beloved by several generations of readers worldwide, notably The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated...
The Unwritten Constitution
A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty by Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch II. University Press of Kansas, 2019. Hardcover, 216 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Luke C. Sheahan C. S. Lewis famously warned that “the...
Great Power Competition Is Like a Bad Designer Drug
We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power by Jason Blakely. Oxford University Press, 2020. Paperback, 184 pages, $28. Reviewed by Anthony M. Barr It is perhaps the most infamous quotation from the George W. Bush years. Karl Rove has...
What Makes a Life
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel by Christopher Beha. Tin House Books, 2020. Hardcover, 528 pages, $28. Reviewed by Jessica Hooten Wilson This is a story that begins with the end of the world. As a young man named Sam Waxworth arrives from “the provinces”...
Stuck with Pound
Cathay: A Critical Edition by Ezra Pound, Edited by Timothy Billings. Fordham University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 364 pages, $35. The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017, Hardcover, 320 pages, $27....
Ah, just your typical 663-page light summer beach read for a @ubookman book review. Makes Wealth of Nations look like a Substack essay.