Depths of Hell, Heights of English
Paradise Lost: A Primer by Michael Cavanagh. Catholic University of America Press, 2020. Paperback, 256 pages, $30. Reviewed by Casey Chalk There’s great value in reading fictional literature that imagines hell, devils, and the origin of evil—and it’s not just because...
Timing Devices
Ordinary Time: Poems by Paul Mariani. Slant Books, 2019. Paperback, 80 pages, $11. Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl The weeks in the Christian liturgical calendar outside the major festal seasons are numbered in ordinary time, First Sunday, Second Sunday, and so on,...
Sources for Rebuilding
A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin. Basic Books, 2020. Hardcover, 256 pages, $28. By Anthony M. Barr “When they were filled, he said unto his...
The Winter Sportsmen-Soldiers
The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America’s Elite Alpine Warriors by Maurice Isserman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. Hardcover, 318 pages, $28. Reviewed by William F. Meehan III I judged Maurice Isserman’s book by its cover...
The Elon Musk of Botany Bay?
The Multifarious Mr. Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, The Natural Historian Who Shaped the World By Toby Musgrave. Yale University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 357 pp., $35. Reviewed by Karl C. Schaffenburg In current usage “multifarious” refers to a thing that demonstrates...
Enlightening the Masses
The Enlightenment That Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748–1830 by Jonathan I. Israel. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 942 pages, $45. Reviewed by Luke Nicastro To commemorate the second anniversary of the Bastille’s seizure, in July of...
Liberty, or Liberties, or Leviathan?
The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America’s Supreme Law by Joseph Tartakovsky. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $26. Reviewed by Jeffrey J. Folks Joseph Tartakovsky’s Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that...
A Quarantine Reading Journal
Eric Hutchinson Charles Portis, Norwood Arkansas’s Charles Portis, most famous as the author of True Grit, died on February 17. Also in February, COVID-19 was spreading around the world. Of these two facts, the first calls for memorialization. The second calls for...
On Goats, and What to Do
How to Burn a Goat: Farming with the Philosophers By Scott H. Moore Baylor University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 224 pp., $29.95. Reviewed by Karl C. Schaffenburg In a brief volume of shorter meditations and several more extended essays, Scott H. Moore, a philosophy...
Ah, just your typical 663-page light summer beach read for a @ubookman book review. Makes Wealth of Nations look like a Substack essay.