A Dark Path to Recovery

The Loss and Recovery of Truth: Selected Writings by Gerhart Niemeyer. Edited by Michael Henry. St. Augustine’s Press, 2013. Hardcover, 648 pages, $60. Gerhart Niemeyer (1907–1997) brought to the study of political science a philosophical sensitivity born of his...

Can Rationalism Make it in the Long Run?

Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2012 Hardcover, 250 pages $50. Paperback, 200 pages, $40.Gene Callahan’s Oakeshott on Rome and America brings Oakeshott’s famous critique of Rationalism to bear upon the concrete...

Rescuing Rockwell

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 512 pages, $28. The art critic Deborah Solomon has performed a rescue operation of the first rank in her new biography, American Mirror: The Life and...

A Reader’s Guide to the Most Brutal Century

A Short History of the Twentieth Century by John Lukacs. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 230 pp. $25. This book is a gem—a highly readable and insightful analysis of what the author, John Lukacs, calls the short twentieth century, which he dates...

Straussians, Founders, and the Faith

Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique by Grant Havers. Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 256 pp., $37. Grant Havers’s study of the Straussian persuasion may be too relentlessly honest to win applause from mainstream...

Better Average Than Unequal

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen. New York, NY: Dutton, 2013. Hardcover, 290 pages, $26.95.In his latest book, Tyler Cowen takes up where The Great Stagnation, his penultimate work, left off. If America’s economy...