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...
The Rise of the State, the End of Enlightenment
Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution By Richard Whatmore. Princeton University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 512 pages, $37.52. Reviewed by Nayeli L. Riano We often consider the Treaty of Westphalia the beginning of the...
The Renaissance Reimagined
The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West by Catherine Fletcher. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 384 pages, $30. Reviewed by Clayton Trutor Not all that long ago, the Renaissance was common cultural terrain in American life....
Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.