Packaged Pleasures. How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire by Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor. University of Chicago Press, 2014. Hardcover, 351 pages, $35. Reviewed by Gerald J. Russello The age of industry was—is—also an age of addiction. We like the...
Jean Vanier: Portrait of a Free Man by Anne-Sophie Constant. Plough, 2019. Paperback, 250 pages, $18. Reviewed by Matthew Loftus About a decade ago came a minor skirmish in the ongoing fight among evangelicals about our disposition towards the faith that goes back...
Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period by Anthony Domestico. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 168 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Literary modernism resembles the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century: the sick old man of...
Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World by Anthony Esolen. Regnery, 2018.Hardcover, 256 pages, $29. Reviewed by Henry George The declaration of political homelessness, feeling bereft of the consolation that being rooted in support for a political party can give, is...
Why Culture Matters Most by David C. Rose. Oxford University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 197 pages, $35. Reviewed by J. Daniel Hammond David Rose’s Why Culture Matters Most tackles a question that economists have been loath to take on—the connection between morals and...
As 2019 begins to wind down, we take stock of the year and note the gaps left by our losses. One such loss is Theodore (T. K.) Rabb, professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, who passed away this January. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a Jewish...
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2019. Hardcover, 528 pages, $30. Reviewed by Joseph S. Laughon. A common Lovecraftian theme is the peril in searching deep within one’s own history for...
On Freedom by Cass R. Sunstein Princeton University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 136 pages, $12.95 Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl After a two-day symposium on “Freedom and Western Civilization” sponsored by Hillsdale College, awaiting me at home was Professor Cass R....
The Grail Mass and Other Works by David Jones. Ed. Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Hardcover, xi + 279 pp., $176. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz David Jones (1895–1974) opens his modern epic, The Anathemata (1952), by quoting the Historia...
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland. Basic Books, 2019. Hardcover, 624 pages, $32. Reviewed by Ben Sixsmith “Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape,” Tom Holland writes cleverly in the...