The Man Who Built Ireland

The Man Who Built Ireland

Kevin O’Higgins: Builder of the Irish State by John P. McCarthy. Irish Academic Press (Portland, Ore.), xvi/312 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2006 The subtitle of John P. McCarthy’s new biography of Kevin O’Higgins, “builder of the Irish state,” seems, at first glance, to...
An Architect for all Purposes

An Architect for all Purposes

Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests: Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical by Douglass Shand-Tucci. University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst), 624 pp., $49.95 cloth, 2005Ralph Adams Cram was a man of such prodigious talents that even two volumes of...
The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others

“A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.” These words of Edmund Burke, which Russell Kirk often invoked, bring home to us, in a set of striking images and historical allusions (the girl is Joan...

Recapturing the Moral Imagination through Scotland

The Sporran by G. L. Gregg (Butler Books, 2007, 275 pp.), $17.95.In his work, Russell Kirk stressed the overriding importance of the moral imagination. The moral imagination, the dynamic interplay of the mind where ideas about good and evil, right and wrong, form...

Capitalism, Socialism, and Beyond

Beyond Capitalism and Socialism: A New Statement of an Old Idea, Tobias Lanz, ed. (IHS Press, 2007, 234 pp.), $19.95. Catholic thinkers have been at the forefront of rethinking modern economics from the perspective of the human person. Beginning with Leo XIII’s...

Books in Little

Separating Fools from their Money: A History of American Financial Scandals, by Scott B. MacDonald and Jane E. Hughes (Transaction Publishers, 264 pp., 2007). In the early 2000s a series of corporate and financial scandals rocked the business world. For months...