No Mere Textbook
Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred M. McClay. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 504 pages, $35. Reviewed by Bruce P. Frohnen In this fine book, Wilfred McClay makes an important contribution to American education and culture. Every year...
Reagan’s Consistent Cheerful Convictions
The Literary Reagan: Authentic Quotations from His Life By Nicholas Dujmovic. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. Hardcover, 346 pages, $88. Reviewed by William F. Meehan III Nicholas Dujmovic’s rationale for compiling and editing The Literary Reagan is clear: the...
On the Rebuilding of Notre-Dame
By James Atkins Pritchard The fire that burned in the very heart of Paris has now for a fortnight been put out. Each night the city’s great cathedral stands in the darkness, roofless but defiant, to greet—as it has at least three hundred thousand times—another dawn....
John L. Connelly: In Memoriam
John Connelly was a longtime Bookman reader and occasional contributor, and also a strong intellectual influence as teacher and mentor on the current editor. His friend and collaborator John McCarthy offers this memorial. An Exemplar of an Educator in the Jesuit...
Attacking the Idols of the Elites
The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe. Little, Brown, 2016. Hardcover, 192 pages, $26. Reviewed by Titus Techera Tom Wolfe was the last of the all-American writers. He made a career of chasing interesting stories on American freedom for half a century. No one else has...
Writer as Goad
Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman. Yale University Press, 2019 Hardcover, 264 pages, $26. Reviewed by Carl Rollyson Ben Hecht is one of those American writers who seems to have had a hand in everything. He was a Chicago newspaperman who also...
Thucydides’s Challenge
How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy by Thucydides, edited by Johanna Hanink. Princeton University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 336 pages, $17. Reviewed by Nick Burns If pulled from his grave near the base of the Pnyx Hill, unceremoniously revivified,...
The Same City
RIP James V. Schall, S. J. By Thomas M. Johnson, Jr. At a Knights of Columbus meeting my freshman year at Georgetown University, a fellow student gave me one piece of advice: Major in Fr. Schall. Take as many of his classes as you can. All seven if possible....
An Historian’s Evolving Vision of Mankind
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. Spiegel and Grau, 2018. Hardcover, 400 pages, $28. Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks Yuval Noah Harari is a brilliant historian teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His 2015 bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!