Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans, by Lawrence N. Powell. Harvard University Press, 2012. Cloth, 448 pages, $30. The city of New Orleans has long had a firm grip on the imagination of Americans (a grip that existed long before the round-the-clock news...

Union and Liberty

May the Road Rise Up to Meet You by Peter Troy. Doubleday, 2012, 400 pp., $27. “How you know whachu stitchin when it don’ look like nothing but a buncha threads ain’ got nothing t’do wit each otha?” asks the ten-year-old slave Mary as she watches her fellow slave and...

American Sound—Twentieth Century

Voices of Stone and Steel: The Music of William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter Mennin by Walter Simmons. Scarecrow Press, 2010 Cloth, 438 pages, $70. In his epochal study Voices in the Wilderness (2008), musicologist Walter Simmons charted the careers and...

Founders’ Faith: None of the Above

The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution by Gregg L. Frazer. University Press of Kansas, 2012, 296 pp., $35. The religious views of America’s founders have been fiercely contested in the public arena for many years. The principal...

On the Long March of the Wolves through the Sheep-pen

Intellectuals and Society: Revised and Expanded Edition by Thomas Sowell. New York: Basic Books, 2012, 669 pages, $19.99. In her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor promenades a remarkable gallery of grotesques through the life of her protagonist Hazel Motes, a...

For a Thousand Memes to Sing

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self by Marilynne Robinson. Yale University Press, 2010. 176 pages, $24.Marilynne Robinson is America’s leading literary Calvinist. This title may give her short shrift, for she is also a...