A Place on the Walls
Thoughts on Home Décor SAM BURNHAM How a home is decorated communicates the essence of the people living there. Even the briefest of glances can give a visitor insight into the personalities, religion, family ties, perhaps even the political inclinations of the...Reoccupying the City
TO THE POINT: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1967 Will we presently behold an exodus from the suburbs back to the city? Such a development would do more to save our urban life than could any amount of urban-renewal and model-cities subsidies. It is not impossible. Many...The Necessity for a General Culture
“What Does Culture Mean?” From America’s British Culture, pp. 1–3 This slim book is a summary account of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Britain. Sometimes this is called the Anglo-Saxon culture—although it is not simply English,...
The Auroras of Helen Vendler
The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: essays on poets & poetry by Helen Vendler. Harvard University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 444 pages, $35. DANIEL JAMES SUNDAHL Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar opens with a twelve-page account of her life as a...
The Cinema of Failure
Four films of Terrence Malick. TITUS TECHERA Terrence Malick is American cinema’s one Christian artist and he has now reached his most productive years, his Social Security years. His four recent movies, The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), Knight of...
Stories of the Lost, Wandering Soul of Modern America
Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories by Thomas McGuane. Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Cloth, 354 pages, $35. JAMES E. PERSON JR. The short stories of Thomas McGuane can be summarized in the words of John Gay’s self-chosen epitaph: “Life is a jest, and all things shew it; /...
Feeding the Little Platoons
Frederick the Great observed that his army marched on its stomach. If we aim to civilize, not conquer, what should we feed Burke’s little platoons? At her first dinner party, Agnes Jekyll entertained John Ruskin, Edward Burne-Jones, and Robert Browning. This is a bit...
The ‘Woke’ History of Democracy
Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought by James T. Kloppenberg. Oxford University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 912 pages, $35. James Kloppenberg has produced an important artifact of contemporary intellectual life. Conservative...
What Exactly Do We Agree On?
“Oh, you snuck in so quietly,” she says, hurrying to help you find your name tag in a pile on a table in the hall of the University Club’s second floor. You are late, and so ascertain which door will let you in at the back and not the front by the speakers before you...
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.