The Two Minds that Made Europe
Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind by Michael Massing. HarperCollins, 2018. Hardcover, 987 pages, $45. Daniel James Sundahl Michael Massing’s thesis in this massive undertaking, Fatal Discord, argues that the rift between Erasmus and...
Put In This World to Do Battle
Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk edited by James E. Person Jr. University of Kentucky Press, 2018. Hardcover, 432 pages, $40. Nicholas Kennicott Letters are often an intimate look into the details of a person’s life and musings, so whenever the...
Philanthropy Is Not Charity
The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity by Jeremy Beer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Hardcover, 124 pages, $20. In The Philanthropic Revolution, Jeremy Beer succeeds in his two-pronged effort to delineate charity from...
Cracking Jokes at the Crack of Doom
Lincoln’s Sense of Humor by Richard Carwardine. Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 184 pages, $24.95. In the lobby of the Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, D.C. stands a three-and-a-half-story tower of Lincoln...
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...
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.