Small Towns Can Be Big Stages

by | Mar 2, 2014

Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future by Robert Wuthnow. Princeton University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 498 pages, $35. Small towns, as Robert Wuthnow points out in his ambitious new book, are not municipal subdivisions of large metropolitan areas....

Unveiling the Obvious

by | Feb 23, 2014

The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. Yale University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 376 pages, $25.To listen to many contemporary atheists, it would seem that the question of whether or not God exists is meaningless. It is not so much...

Hollow Men and the Search for a Workable Pluralism

by | Feb 9, 2014

The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief by George M. Marsden. Basic Books, 2014. Hardcover, 264 pp. $27. Randall Jarrell once observed that “The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow...

Conservatism and Decline

by | Feb 2, 2014

The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk. Fifth revised edition. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1973. In 1902, from somewhere on Regent Street, my mother watched Edward VII’s coronation parade. As she saw this gold and scarlet pageant drawn from the...

Happier Cities, Happier Lives?

by | Jan 26, 2014

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 290 pages, $27.This is a fascinating and informative but at the same time maddening book. It contains a wealth of evidence making the case that...

A Fair-Minded Polemic

by | Jan 12, 2014

LeoStrauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal by Paul Edward Gottfried. Cambridge, 2013. Paperback, 194 pages, $27. Every year brings a new crop of books about Leo Strauss. The New York Times last year reviewed two, Laurence Lampert’s The...