Grounding the Life of the Mind

Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books (Wilmington, DE), 2011. 187 pp., $28 clothThe Great Books approach to education, promoted by one of the subjects of this book, Mortimer Adler, is noble in...

A Thundering Paradox of a Life

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis. New York: The Penguin Press. 2011. 784 pp. $40. William Manchester in his acclaimed biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar, introduced his subject as a “thundering paradox of a man.” The same could be...

Man, Proud Man

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo, translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso Books, 2011. Pages viii+375. $35. Paradox and irony immediately confront the historian of liberalism. Commonly understood as the tradition of political thought...

Undoing the Ties that Bind

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray. New York: Crown Forum, 2012, 416 pp., hardcover, $27. In America, it is currently difficult to define what it means to be an American. Not anecdotally, as in “what does it mean to you?” or “what...

Defending the Humane Tradition

The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, edited by Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter. ISI Books, 2011. Cloth, 336 pages, $30. Reviewed by Tobias J. Lanz Wendell Berry is one of America’s most ardent defenders of the humane tradition—one of the few viable alternatives...

Eliot Through His Letters

The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. II: 1923–1925 (U.S. Edition) edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. Yale University Press, 2011. 878 pp. $45. Since the first volume of Eliot’s letters (1898–1922) appeared in 1988, scholars and enthusiasts waited impatiently for...