The Cost of a Global Revolution
The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History by Alexander Mikaberidze. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 960 pages, $40. Reviewed by Casey Chalk Many, I’d imagine, would be intimidated by a 960-page book on the Napoleonic era. Or perhaps they’d be uninterested,...
Can Whimsy Save the Small-Town Novel?
Virgil Wander by Leif Enger. Grove Press, 2018. Paperback, 320 pages, $17. Reviewed by Matt Miller Small towns in American fiction have a history as varied as the landscapes they inhabit. Often stifling or enervating, as in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sherwood...
Voting the Bible
The Bible and the Ballot: Using Scripture in Political Discussions by Tremper Longman III. Eerdmans, 2020. Softcover, 310 pages, $24.99. Reviewed by Jason Jewell The political involvement of American Protestant evangelicals has ebbed and flowed in the past century....
From Shakespeare to Second Life
Daniel Buck Most video games exist for crass entertainment. Others rise above with compelling storylines but remain pop-art at best. A rare few, however, boast the philosophical weight of a nineteenth-century Russian novel. Conservatives overlook this final category...
Succession and the Anarchy
Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior by Catherine Hanley. Yale University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 277 pages, $30. Reviewed by Timothy D. Lusch By none but me can the tale be told, The butcher of Rouen, poor Berold. (Lands are swayed by a King on a throne.) ’Twas a royal...
Churchill’s Summer of Destiny
John P. Rossi Winston Churchill was the greatest orator of the twentieth century. His most famous speeches rank with those of giants like Lincoln and Martin Luther King. A master of rhetoric with a gift for the memorable phrase, six of his speeches were transformative...Beyond Cancel Culture
O’Connor, Updike, and the Literature of Self-Recrimination Michial Farmer The recent intra-literati arguments about Flannery O’Connor’s racism are, if nothing else, hard proof that ideas have consequences. Not long after the police killing of George Floyd ignited...
Burke’s Mannered Economics
Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy by Gregory M. Collins. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 578 pages, $50. Reviewed by John G. Grove Only someone like Edmund Burke could find in the “motions of England’s internal grain trade” anything...
How the Vikings Saw Themselves
Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price. Basic Books, 2020. Hardcover, 624 pages, $35. Reviewed by Clayton Trutor When I stroll through the stacks of a college library, I often find my way over to the DL60s—History of Northern Europe: Earliest...
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