Tolkien and the Great Tale

The Christian World of ‘The Hobbit’ by Devin Brown. Abingdon Press, 2012 193 pp., $14.99 paper.J. R. R. Tolkien’s fame as a founder of modern fantasy and as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century is assured. But he is still often not recognized...

(The Future of) Liberalism in Our Disordered Age

Post-Liberalism: The Death of a Dream by Melvyn L. Fein. Transaction Press, 2012. Cloth, 359 pages, $40.Reality is never as we think of it. Yet we must live, act, think, choose, and find our place within some story about reality that purports to lay out the...

Think Local, Act Local

How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism by Roger Scruton. Oxford University Press, 2012. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30.The political left has long dominated the modern environmental movement. British philosopher Roger Scruton...

A Church of One

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry. Viking, 2012, Cloth, 480 pages, $35. Puritans came to America wanting to found a church more faithful to their beliefs. But they had a problem. In...

Hope or Despair? Roger Kimball and the Future of Culture

The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia by Roger Kimball. St. Augustine’s Press, 2012. Hardcover, 360 pp., $35. For those who cherish the life of the mind, one of the saddest events of 2012 was the death of the great historian Jacques...

The Persistence of History

After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy by Chilton Williamson, Jr. ISI Books, 2012 Hardcover, 288 pages, $28Twenty years ago, as the Cold War ended with the triumph of the West over Communism, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history,” by which...