A Madisonian Lament

A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption by Jay Cost. Encounter Books, 2015. Hardcover, 393 pages, $28.This Madisonian lament might have been written as early as the 1790s and the battle over the constitutionality of the First...

The Habsburgs, a Reconsideration

The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter M. Judson. Belknap Press, 2016. Hardcover, 592 pages, $35. The Habsburg Monarchy has long been seen as an outdated empire doomed to fail. To the Central European societies it sheltered before 1914, it may have had a cosy...

The Limits (and Misuse) of Air Power

The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940–1945. By Richard Overy. New York: Viking, 2013. Paperback, 592 pages, $18.In 1938, as war clouds gathered, America’s commander in chief, President Franklin Roosevelt met in November with an ad hoc...

A Return to the Thought-Murders

Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. Viking, 2000. 233 pages.Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about the last years of philosopher-provocateur Allan Bloom, may be the best post-9/11 novel published in the year 2000. Ravelstein has as many virtues as its subject has...

Last Scholastic Standing

Neo-Scholastic Essays by Edward Feser. St. Augustine’s Press, 2015. Paperback, 392 pages, $26. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel   When the Prodigal Son decided to auction off his inheritance, his half of the estate did not disappear. Rather, the number of owners and of...