The Soul of Man Under Socialism

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith. Grove Press, 2017. Hardcover, 256 pages, $25.The title of this review is taken from Oscar Wilde’s celebrated essay carrying the same name. Writing in 1891, Wilde tries to...

The Greater Your Heart, the Greater Your Sorrows

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith. Grove Press, 2017. Hardcover, 256 pages, $25.Though they be dry as a desert And rough as a grassland Shabby as an invalid And primitive as stone tools Reader! I beg you to...

Revolt No More: A Return to Midwestern History

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965 by Jon K. Lauck. University of Iowa Press, 2017. Paperback, 246 pages, $27.50.No single person has done more to revitalize the study of the Midwest than Jon...

A Forgotten Hero of the War

Fighter Pilot by L. C. Beck. [Wetzel 1946] Kessinger Publishing, 2010. Paperback, 200 pages, $20.June 6, 1944, D-day for the long awaited Allied invasion of continental Europe. Success meant the beginning of the end of Germany’s Third Reich; failure would give...

The Whole Truth

How to Be a Conservative by Roger Scruton. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Hardcover, ix + 195 pages, $20.50.One of Roger Scruton’s mentors, T. S. Eliot, frequently observed that heresies are usually half-truths. As Eliot says in The Idea of a Christian Society,...

The Real, Imagined

Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Columbia University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 344 pages, $26.There is a phrase in Latin—“Laudator temporis acti,” which when translated into...