The Happy Skeptic

Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father by Thomas S. Kidd. Yale University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 288 pages, $30.   John Adams once commented of his senior colleague, Benjamin Franklin, that “the Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The...

Transylvanian Dreams and Nightmares

Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula by Bram Stoker and Valdimar Ásmundsson, Translated by Hans Corneel de Roos. Overlook Press, 2017. Hardcover, 320 pages, $30.Dracula appeared first in a dream. In a journal entry dated March 8, 1890, Bram Stoker writes,...

A French Murder and Its Aftermath

Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes by Ivan Jablonka. Paris: Le Seuil, 2016. Paperback, 400 pages, €21.On the night of January 18, 2011, Laëtitia Perrais, an eighteen-year-old French girl, was brutally murdered near the village where she lived in the Nantes region. She’d...

Burning River: Glimpses from the Banks of the Cuyahoga

Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology, 2nd Edition, edited by Richie Piiparinen and Anne Trubek. Belt Publishing, 2014. Paper, 272 pages, $20. The Akron Anthology, edited by Jason Segedy. Belt Publishing, 2016. Paper, 211 pages, $20. When I first emigrated from...

Treasures in the Garden

The Walled Garden: Poems by Andrew Thornton-Norris. CreateSpace, 2011, 2015. Paper, 74 pages, $7. Few things have frustrated supporters of traditionalist or conservative aesthetics than the state of contemporary poetry. It seems that not a year goes by with at least...

Recovering Thoreau

TweetHenry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Hardcover, 640 pages, $35. Reviewed by John Byron Kuhner Of all the great American writers, I think I pity Henry David Thoreau the most. Long paired by curriculum writers with...