Coming to Terms with Sherman

Coming to Terms with Sherman

Gates of Heaven: A Novel By Glenn Arbery. Wiseblood Books, 2025. Paperback, 554 pages, $20. Reviewed by Chilton Williamson, Jr. Gates of Heaven is Glenn Arbery’s third novel; it is also the last in a trilogy that, reckoning by the publication dates, was a labor that...
Solzhenitsyn and the Spirituality of Self-Limitation

Solzhenitsyn and the Spirituality of Self-Limitation

We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  Edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn. University of Notre Dame Press, 2025. Hardcover, 228 pages, $28. Reviewed by William Scott. The eighth title to appear in Notre Dame Press’s “Center for...
How Should We Think About Inequality?

How Should We Think About Inequality?

Why Democracy Needs the Rich By John O. McGinnis. Encounter Books, 2026. Hardcover, 280 pages, $32.99. Reviewed by Michael Munger. Hostility toward wealth is not an American value. But that has changed in the past 15 years, with a culturally salient event being Barack...
Enchanting Criticism: Dana Gioia as Literary Critic 

Enchanting Criticism: Dana Gioia as Literary Critic 

Poetry as Enchantment: And Other Essays By Dana Gioia. Paul Dry Books, 2024. Paperback, 272 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Oliver Spivey. In his essay titled “Reading,” W. H. Auden sets forth what he views as the special duties of the literary critic: What is the function...
The Machine or the Garden?

The Machine or the Garden?

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity By Paul Kingsnorth. Thesis/Penguin Random House, 2025. Hardcover, 368 pages, $32. Reviewed by Paul Krause. In the beginning was the garden. That is a very standard myth to start. Many cultures have foundation myths that...
What Plato Meant

What Plato Meant

Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political By Melissa Lane. Princeton University Press, 2023.  Hardcover, 480 pages, $49.95.  Reviewed by Jesse Russell. In October of 1993, a trial took place in Colorado regarding Colorado Amendment 2, a ballot measure that...