Look Under the Turnip

The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver Schönwerth, translated with an introduction and commentary by Maria Tatar. Penguin Classics, 2015. Paperback, 288 pages, $17.In 2012, in Regensburg, Germany, Erica Eichenseer, a cultural curator...

The Final Artistic Taboo

After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History by Arthur Danto. Princeton University Press, 1997, 2014. Paperback, 272 pages, $20.“How can someone possessed of learning and culture in the highest degree spread ideas that are entirely inimical to...

From the Trenches to the Shire

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, & Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914–1918. by Joseph Loconte. Thomas Nelson, 2015. Hardcover, 244 pages, $25.Many words have been devoted to the literature and...

Ethnicity Matters

Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Oxford University Press, 1993. Hardcover, 221 pages, $110. In 1947, Solomon Bloom, a student of Marxism and nationalism, published an article in Commentary entitled “The Peoples of my Home...

Norman Lear, Conservative?

Even This I Get to Experience by Norman Lear. Penguin Press, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $33.British comic novelist and television writer Douglas Adams was once asked to explain the difference between a comic writer and a wit. “A wit will think of a funny response at...

The Whig Theory of Christianity

Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $35. In its basic assumptions, liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity. It emerged as the moral institutions...