History in A Secular Age

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad S. Gregory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. Hardcover, 574 pages, $40. In The Unintended Reformation, Brad S. Gregory argues that today’s Western world...

Reconsidering Orwell’s Essays

A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. Doubleday, 1952. [Harcourt, 1970] Reviewed by John P. Rossi George Orwell was the greatest essayist of the twentieth century. Sixty years ago, at the height of his fame as the author of Animal Farm, Orwell published a...

Visions of Order

The Unwinding: an Inner History of the New America by George Packer. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 448 pages, $27.Liberal journalist George Packer has written a conservative book. At least, I found it to be conservative, at its core. In this “inner...

Can You Hear Me Now?

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Broadway/Random House, 2013. Paper, 368 pages, $16. In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain seeks to create a revolution, and after reading her...

Another Epitaph on American Exceptionalism

Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century by Patrick Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 231 pages, $27.50. This slender volume consists of four essays offering four variations on a single theme. Since “the American century is behind...

Characterizing the Two Britains

Sea Changes by Derek Turner. Washington Summit Publishers, 2012. Paperback, 456 pages, $23. “And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. In another second Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the...