Don’t Fret Too Much About Success

Opening Belle: A Novel by Maureen Sherry. Simon & Schuster, 2016 Hardcover, 338 pp., $25.Books, especially first novels by new novelists in search of an audience, are marketed with a singular purpose. In order to attract sales and readership, they are classified...

The Life of ‘Mere Christianity’

C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography by George M. Marsden. Lives of Great Religious Books series. Princeton University Press,2016. Hardcover, 264 pages, $25.George M. Marsden, the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Notre...

Finding Freedom in a Totalitarian Age

Eumeswil. By Ernst Jünger. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Introduction by Russell A. Berman. Telos Press, 2015. Paperback, 330 pages, $27. Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was twentieth-century Germany’s most prolific writer. Throughout his long career he wrote novels,...

A New Look at Benjamin Disraeli

Disraeli: The Novel Politician by David Cesarani. Yale University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 292 pages, $25. Reviewed by John P. Rossi Of the so-called “Victorian Giants”—William Ewart Gladstone, Lord Palmerston, Joseph Chamberlain—none have fascinated the public as much...

America’s Own Richard II

Being Nixon: A Man Divided by Evan Thomas. Random House, 2015. Hardcover, 619 pages, $35. The Nixon Effect: How Richard Nixon’s Presidency Fundamentally Changed American Politics by Douglas Schoen. Encounter Books, 2016. Hardcover, 384 pages, $27.“Even Richard Nixon...

Enlarging Emily Dickinson

A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century by Jerome Charyn. Bellevue Literary Press, 2016. Paperback, 255 pages, $20. The first part of Jerome Charyn’s title alludes to one of Emily Dickinson’s most enigmatic and powerful poems, which begins, “My Life had...