How the Land Can Heal
Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, a New Earth by Charles Massy. Chelsea Green, 2018. Paperback, 511 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Matt Miller Americans today little appreciate how European settlement transformed the landscape of this continent. Before...
The Superhero and the City
Superhero Ethics: 10 Comic Book Heroes; 10 Ways to Save the World; Which One Do We Need Most Now? by Travis Smith. Templeton Press, 2018. Hardcover, 190 pages, $25. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel Classical art imitated life to cultivate it. In Greek sculpture, great souls...
Scruton, Defender of the Past
Jeffrey Folks Roger Scruton was the author of over fifty books and of a great many articles and notes. He taught at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992, and later part-time at other universities, and he was a prominent speaker at conferences and institutes,...
Effing the Ineffable
Music as an Art by Roger Scruton. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018. Hardcover, 272 pages, $32. Reviewed by Robert Grant Price In Music as an Art, the late Roger Scruton seeks to defend Western high culture by defending its summit, classical music. It was a defense Scruton...
Champagne Flute with an Iron Spine
Dystopia and Providence in Five Novels Eve Tushnet The political upheavals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries bore all kinds of names, from the euphemistic “people’s republic” to the dystopian “total war.” It’s hard to name precisely what was born of these...
Constitutional Arguments, Constitutional Stories
An interview with Ken I. Kersch We are pleased to publish this interview with Ken I. Kersch, about his recent book, Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Ken I....
Making a Home Among Monsters and Martians
Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country by B. J. Hollars. University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Paperback, 208 pages, $20. Reviewed by Jacob A. Bruggeman It was around the time of my ninth birthday that I realized the Loch...
Metaphysics for a Broken Western World
The Discovery of Being and Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives Edited by Christopher M. Cullen, SJ and Franklin T. Harkins. Catholic University of America Press, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $75. Reviewed by Gerard T. Mundy The Western world...
Faith and Works and the Novel
The Decline of the Novel by Joseph Bottum. St. Augustine’s Press, 2019. Hardcover, 153 pages, $25. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill In this wide-ranging essay, Joseph Bottum has managed to turn a stale topic—the death of the novel—into fresh cultural criticism, arguing...
Summer is here and the days are long. Slowing schedules allow time for many of us to sink into the queue of books that have been patiently waiting for us over the busyness of our end of spring schedules.
@lsheahan, @DavidGBonaguraJ, @darrellfalconbu
Ah, just your typical 663-page light summer beach read for a @ubookman book review. Makes Wealth of Nations look like a Substack essay.