When Left and Right Agree

When Left and Right Agree

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream By Nicholas Lemann. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Hardcover, 306 pages, $28. Reviewed by Gerard T. Mundy To capture the gravity of the social problems plaguing the United States, one can...
Prin’s Original Fictions

Prin’s Original Fictions

Original Prin: A Novel by Randy Boyagoda. Biblioasis, 2019. Paperback, 224 pages, $15. Reviewed by Joshua Hren Toward the end of Original Prin our protagonist Princely St. John Umbiligoda sifts through the Duty-Free shop in the Dragomans airport only to find the...
Musket Before the Ax: Howells and Ohio

Musket Before the Ax: Howells and Ohio

Stories of Ohio by William Dean Howells. Belt Publishing, 2019. Paperback, 256 pages, $14.95. Reviewed by Jacob A. Bruggeman The year 1860 was a predictably good one for William Dean Howells, an up-and-coming man of letters from Ohio. In the four years prior, Howells...
Passing through the Gathering Dusk

Passing through the Gathering Dusk

Winesburg, Ohio at 100 By James E. Person Jr. Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life by Sherwood Anderson. W. W. Norton & Company, [1919] 1995. Paperback, 256 pages, $12.64. The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without...
Christ in the Outback

Christ in the Outback

God Is Good for You: A Defence of Christianity in Troubled Times by Greg Sheridan. Allen & Unwin, 2018. Paperback, 358 pages, $20. Reviewed by Karl Schmude Greg Sheridan is one of Australia’s leading journalists and media commentators. As the long-time Foreign...
Leviathan at Bay, at Last?

Leviathan at Bay, at Last?

Judicial Fortitude: The Last Chance to Rein in the Administrative State By Peter J. Wallison. Encounter Books, 2018. Cloth, 216 pages, $24. Reviewed by Stephen B. Presser When, in the decades to come, historians look back at the early twenty-first century, they will...
Federalism Against the Slave Power

Federalism Against the Slave Power

American Abolitionism: Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction by Stanley Harrold. University of Virginia Press, 2019. Hardcover. 296 pages. $39.50. Reviewed by Carl Lawrence Paulus The New York Times Magazine recently commemorated the four...
Lincoln, Burke, and the Politics of Prudence

Lincoln, Burke, and the Politics of Prudence

Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln, and the Politics of Prudence by Greg Weiner. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 184 pages, $24. Reviewed by Kyle Sammin More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other man, excepting only Jesus Christ, who all must admit is...
Sacrificial Crisis

Sacrificial Crisis

Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbery, directed by Danya Taymore Playwrights Horizons (New York), September 13–November 17, 2019. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill Will Arbery has described his new play as a six-part fugue. Its subject—the kernel from which the rest...