A Novel Out of Time

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin. Translated by Lisa Hayden. Oneworld Publications, 2015. Cloth, 352 pages, $25. In an interview with Rod Dreher, Eugene Vodalazkin, author of the novel Laurus, says that he wanted to write about something good. In the same interview he...

The Many Dimensions of Charles Williams

Charles Williams: The Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop. Oxford University Press, 2015. Cloth, xx + 493 pp., $35.Acclaimed in his day by the likes of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams (1886–1945) suffered a...

Judges and Dons

Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary by Richard Posner. Harvard University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 432 pages, $30.For a still-active judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit who “moonlights” as a law professor, Richard Posner is oddly and...

Memory and Mythmaking

The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 (Citizens and Soldiers) By Nicholas Stargardt Basic Books, 2015. Hardcover, 704 pp., $35. At the end of 1999, Time named Albert Einstein as “Person of the Century.” At a New Year’s Eve celebration held in a German castle...

Modernists in Middle-Earth

Tolkien among the Moderns, edited by Ralph C. Wood. University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Paperback, 303 pages, $32.I was first assigned to read J. R. R. Tolkien in 1968 when I was in the seventh grade. In that time of rage, rebellion, anxiety, and experimentation,...

Hope for a Conservative Remnant

The Conservative Rebellion by Richard Bishirjian. St. Augustine’s Press, 2015. Hardcover, 171 pages, $25. One of the more common definitions of conservatism as stated by its critics is that it is a philosophy enthralled with preserving the status quo. This definition...