The Unwritten Constitution
A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty by Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch II. University Press of Kansas, 2019. Hardcover, 216 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Luke C. Sheahan C. S. Lewis famously warned that “the...
Great Power Competition Is Like a Bad Designer Drug
We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power by Jason Blakely. Oxford University Press, 2020. Paperback, 184 pages, $28. Reviewed by Anthony M. Barr It is perhaps the most infamous quotation from the George W. Bush years. Karl Rove has...
What Makes a Life
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel by Christopher Beha. Tin House Books, 2020. Hardcover, 528 pages, $28. Reviewed by Jessica Hooten Wilson This is a story that begins with the end of the world. As a young man named Sam Waxworth arrives from “the provinces”...
Stuck with Pound
Cathay: A Critical Edition by Ezra Pound, Edited by Timothy Billings. Fordham University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 364 pages, $35. The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017, Hardcover, 320 pages, $27....
A Virus and a Fall of Rome
Scarpia by Piers Paul Read. Bloomsbury, 2016. Hardcover, 364 pages, $27. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill You could enjoy this novel about a young Sicilian rising through the ranks of Roman society in the 1790s without knowing anything about Puccini’s Tosca. It’s a...
A Christmas Carol is great literature. Ghosts are a must for Christmas.