Like a Jazz Score: The Sense for Life
Pedro Blas González Improvisation as Metaphor Musicians often talk about there being no wrong notes, only notes that they do not intend to play. This is particularly true in jazz. At least in jazz, this serves as the impetus to structure improvisation. If we pay...
Nothing More to Prove
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 By Zachary Leader Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Hardcover, 784 pages, $40. Reviewed by Carl Rollyson I was hard on the first volume, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964, in the June 2015 issue of The New...
Liturgies Real and Imagined
The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs by Martin Mosebach. Plough, 2019. Hardcover, 272 pages, $26. What Was Before: A Novel, by Martin Mosebach. Seagull Books, 2014. Hardcover, 248 pages, $27.50. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill This powerful little book...
Humanism, Reform, Heresy
Calvin’s Tormentors: Understanding the Conflicts That Shaped the Reformer by Gary W. Jenkins. Baker Academic, 2018. Paperback, 208 pages, $28. Reviewed by Chris Butynskyi In the wake of the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Christians are...
Weaponized Christianity
The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity By Daniel J. Mahoney Foreword by Pierre Manent. Encounter Books, 2018. Hardcover, 163 pages, $24. Reviewed by Grant Havers In this age of numerous polemics against “political correctness,” “Social...
Narrating the Future
Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future By Jason Phillips. Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 320 pages, $35. Reviewed by Carl Lawrence Paulus “What is past is prologue.” William Shakespeare’s line from The Tempest is inscribed...
Writing from the Edge of the Middle
Interior States: Essays by Meghan O’Gieblyn. Anchor, 2018. Paperback, 240 pages, $16. Reviewed by Veery Huleatt I learned to see myself as an anachronism when I was about nine, when I caught sight of my reflection overlaid on the posters of beautiful women advertising...
Two Tolkiens on View
Two Tolkiens on View Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth [Exhibition catalogue] Edited by Catherine McIlwaine. Bodleian Library, 2018. Hardcover, 416 pages, $65. Reviewed by Alexi Sargeant The red jumps off the page. You’re in the middle of a letter from Father Christmas...
Why Make Men Pigs
Circe by Madeline Miller. Little, Brown and Company, 2018. Hardcover, 400 pages, $27. Reviewed by Colleen M. Curran Madeline Miller’s 2011 debut novel, Song of Achilles, presented a recasting of Homer’s Iliad that retold the familiar tale from the perspective of...
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!