Buckley and Individualist Conservatism

Buckley: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism by Carl T. Bogus. Bloomsbury Press, 2011. 405 pp. $30.00. William F. Buckley, Jr. continues to stand as the representative conservative of the postwar era. Bon vivant, former CIA operative, heir to...

Religious Modernity

The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 386 pages, $22.50. Seeking to clarify what we mean by “modernity,” Michael Gillespie provides an intellectual history of the subject by reaching back to the...

Hemingway in Perspective

Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 by Paul Hendrickson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, 531 pp.Ernest Hemingway is to twentieth-century literature what Humphrey Bogart was to the same century’s cinema. More than any other actor, one need not...

Herbert Hoover, Revisionist

Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. Edited and with an introduction by George H. Nash. Hoover Institution Press, 2011. 957 pp. $40.95. Herbert Hoover has always been in danger of falling down the memory hole. He...

Lewis’s Aeneid, Labor Amoris

C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile translated by C. S. Lewis; edited by A. T. Reyes. Yale University Press, 2011. Hardcover, 184 pages, $28.Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one who attempts to employ his own...

An Everlasting Man of Letters

G. K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xiv + 747 pp., $65.00 cloth Among the genres in which G. K. Chesterton wrote was critical biography. With typical paradox, Chesterton defined two duties for such authors that seem...