Henry George, Anti-Statist

Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age by Edward T. O’Donnell. Columbia University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 376 pages, $38. Historian Edward O’Donnell’s Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality is a fascinating, if...

Lessons from a Failed Party?

John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, & Ardent Nationalist by Andrew R. Black. Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Cloth, 343 pages, $48. Lawyer, professor, statesman, and cabinet official, John Pendleton Kennedy is best remembered...

Backcountry Wisdom from an Investment Banker

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance. Harper, 2016. Hardcover, 264 pages, $28. Whether or not Donald Trump self-destructs on the campaign trail this year, the wave of anger he’s been riding—like the wave enabling the recent...

The Latin Literature that almost Wasn’t

Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature by Denis Feeney. Harvard University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 400 pages, $35.If students of literature and the classics take anything for granted, it is the existence of the texts themselves, be they in the original Latin...

A Rebel Against Rebellion

Conversations with Roger Scruton by Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016. Hardcover, 213 pages, $28. Roger Scruton’s (b. 1944) conservatism has scandalized the bulk of the British intellectual community since the 1970s. This thinker and writer’s...

The Art of Robotics

Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson by Gary Lachman. TarcherPerigee, 2016. Paperback, 416 pages, $26. On the heels of Colin Stanley’s anthology of Colin Wilson’s Collected Essays on Philosophers comes the first biography of Wilson since that writer’s...