Athwart Silicon Valley
Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials by Matthew Hennessey. Encounter Books, 2018. Hardcover, 184 pages, $24. Reviewed by Matthew Stokes There’s a phrase once heard in television commercials and now common on social...
The Two Minds that Made Europe
Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind by Michael Massing. HarperCollins, 2018. Hardcover, 987 pages, $45. Daniel James Sundahl Michael Massing’s thesis in this massive undertaking, Fatal Discord, argues that the rift between Erasmus and...
Put In This World to Do Battle
Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk edited by James E. Person Jr. University of Kentucky Press, 2018. Hardcover, 432 pages, $40. Nicholas Kennicott Letters are often an intimate look into the details of a person’s life and musings, so whenever the...
Philanthropy Is Not Charity
The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity by Jeremy Beer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Hardcover, 124 pages, $20. In The Philanthropic Revolution, Jeremy Beer succeeds in his two-pronged effort to delineate charity from...
Cracking Jokes at the Crack of Doom
Lincoln’s Sense of Humor by Richard Carwardine. Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 184 pages, $24.95. In the lobby of the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, D.C. stands a three-and-a-half-story tower of Lincoln...
The Cycles of Networked History?
The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson. Penguin Press, 2018. Hardcover, 592 pages, $30. Matthew M. Robare Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower is a short, sometimes too short, book that provides an...
From Hope to Hope: On the Mind of Man
James V. Schall, S. J. The second essay of Samuel Johnson’s entries in The Rambler was published on Saturday, March 24, 1750. The essay begins with what must be called a general experience of all mankind, thus including one’s own self-knowledge: “The mind of man is...
The Questions Behind Populism
Vox Populi: The Perils and Promises of Populism edited by Roger Kimball. Encounter Books, 2017. Hardcover, 216 pages, $24. MARLO SAFI Over the course of the 2016 Presidential election, Americans became very familiar with the resurgence of an old “ism”: populism....
Which Philosophers Lived Their Thought?
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, translated by Pamela Mensch, edited by James Miller. Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 720 pages, $45. Frank Freeman When Nietzsche was still a classical philologist, not the Hyperborean philosopher he...
My summer reading: @NBlakeEPPC's Victims of the Revolution, @AmericanGwyn's The Cannibal Owl (read @danielcowper's review https://bit.ly/3G0EOIb), Kent Haruf's Plainsong, and more.
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/editors-summer-reading-2/
What will @lsheahan, @DavidGBonaguraJ, Isabel Dobbs and @darrellfalconbu of @ubookman be reading this summer? Check out the post below.