America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It By C. Bradley Thompson. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 461 pages, $32.99. Reviewed by Gerard T. Mundy On the fusionist political right, there are several...
Milan Kundera, Ambiguous Prophet Trevor C. Merrill “Those no longer able to see reality with their own eyes are equally unable to hear correctly,” writes Josef Pieper. “It is specifically the man thus impoverished who inevitably falls prey to the demagogical spells of...
Freedom: An Unruly History by Annelien de Dijn. Harvard University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 432 pages, $35. Reviewed by John G. Grove Chances are, anyone who took an introductory course in political theory learned something of the difference between “positive” and...
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...
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: 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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Climate Realism in an Alarmed Age
Joshua J. Bowman on "Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism," edited by E. Calvin Beisner and David R. Legates. @Regnery
