The Marxist Jeremiah

Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 234 pages, $26.There are few polemicists writing in the English language today as erudite, or as pugnacious, as Terry Eagleton. Nor are there many public intellectuals who so defy...

Science Fiction Worth Re-Reading?

What Makes This Book so Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Jo Walton. Tor, 2014. Hardcover, 447 pages, $27.Insofar as “genre” means commercial formula-fiction, it is safe to say that between the late nineteenth century, when the formulas...

An Echo from the Cold War

The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven For Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2014. Hardcover, 231 pages (plus acknowledgments, notes, and index), $28. Write a nonfiction history to read like a novel—offering suspense, interesting...

The Prospect of an Authentic Conservatism

Prospects for Conservatives: A Compass for Rediscovering the Permanent Things by Russell Kirk, with a new introduction by Bradley J. Birzer. Imaginative Conservative Books, 2013. Hardcover, 278 pages, $25.Russell Kirk’s most spirited work, Prospects for Conservatives...

How Dwight Became Dwight

Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered by Tadeusz Lewandowski. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2013. Hardcover, 149 pages, $41. So intensely European was the critic Dwight Macdonald’s spirit, so routinely did he use European...

Anti-Catholicism and Manifest Destiny

Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 256 pages, $45.Missionaries of Republicanism, a volume in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Religion in America series,...