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...
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...
The Dismissed in Revolt
The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics by Salena Zito and Brad Todd. Crown Forum, 2018. Hardcover, 309 pages, $28. Addison Del Mastro “We as a country cannot just let our fellow Americans be left behind, dismissed because someone...
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...
.@JM_Butcher himself admits that there are in fact important divisions within American society, but he believes that “Americans are united on some very important questions that are driving debates in statehouses, schoolhouses, and even your house.” In this, as in nearly all that
Despite [Kirk's] and others’ efforts to prevent further decline in transcendent beliefs, more than a century later, it is clear that those Americans who adhere to them represent a small and frequently marginalized minority. @fhmcclatchey must be counted among their number, for he