Ishmael’s Real Name Was Jonah

Ishmael’s Real Name Was Jonah

The Interpretive Key that Allows Us to See Melville’s Work as a Unified Whole By Will Hoyt Like any other card-carrying American I have long believed that Melville wrote only one great work. Moby-Dick is—unquestionably if improbably—the one American novel against...
Discouraging Charity

Discouraging Charity

Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms by Howard A. Husock. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 176 pages $24. Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl It’s a likely sign of the times. On a Tuesday last December, the phone rang with...
The Order that Transcends the Upheavals

The Order that Transcends the Upheavals

The Persistence of Order, Vol. I: Essays on Religion and Culture Edited by Christopher Dawson and T. F. Burns. Cluny Media, 2019. Paperback, 304 pages, $19.95 The Persistence of Order, Vol. II: Essays on Politics and Society Edited by Christopher Dawson and...
The Unwritten Constitution

The Unwritten Constitution

A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty by Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch II. University Press of Kansas, 2019. Hardcover, 216 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Luke C. Sheahan C. S. Lewis famously warned that “the...
Great Power Competition Is Like a Bad Designer Drug

Great Power Competition Is Like a Bad Designer Drug

We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power by Jason Blakely. Oxford University Press, 2020. Paperback, 184 pages, $28. Reviewed by Anthony M. Barr It is perhaps the most infamous quotation from the George W. Bush years. Karl Rove has...
What Makes a Life

What Makes a Life

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel by Christopher Beha. Tin House Books, 2020. Hardcover, 528 pages, $28. Reviewed by Jessica Hooten Wilson This is a story that begins with the end of the world. As a young man named Sam Waxworth arrives from “the provinces”...
Stuck with Pound

Stuck with Pound

Cathay: A Critical Edition by Ezra Pound, Edited by Timothy Billings. Fordham University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 364 pages, $35. The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017, Hardcover, 320 pages, $27....
A Virus and a Fall of Rome

A Virus and a Fall of Rome

Scarpia by Piers Paul Read. Bloomsbury, 2016. Hardcover, 364 pages, $27. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill You could enjoy this novel about a young Sicilian rising through the ranks of Roman society in the 1790s without knowing anything about Puccini’s Tosca. It’s a...
The Rise of the State, the End of Enlightenment

The Rise of the State, the End of Enlightenment

Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution By Richard Whatmore. Princeton University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 512 pages, $37.52. Reviewed by Nayeli L. Riano We often consider the Treaty of Westphalia the beginning of the...