The Classically Educated Mind of W. E. B Du Bois

The Classically Educated Mind of W. E. B Du Bois

Co-Workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois By David Withun.  Oxford University Press, 2022.  Hardcover, 256 pages, $80.00. Reviewed by Chris Butynskyi. Race, class, gender. These are three important components...
Cormac McCarthy’s Historical Literary Influences

Cormac McCarthy’s Historical Literary Influences

Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy’s Expanding Worlds  By Bryan Giemza. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Hardcover, 184 pages, $100. Reviewed by Philip D. Bunn. Works of scholarship on art, literature, or poetry can take multiple forms. One form might be scholarship...
Two Cities: The Public and the Private

Two Cities: The Public and the Private

A reflection on Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities By Igor Damous. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every...
Remembering Our Unruly Character

Remembering Our Unruly Character

Character in the American Experience: An Unruly People  By Bruce P. Frohnen and Ted V. McAllister. Lexington Books, 2022. Hardcover, 208 pages, $95. Reviewed by Ryan R. Holston. Truth-telling with regard to historical life is never a question of laying bare “the...
Why Public Reason Fails

Why Public Reason Fails

Tradition and the Deliberative Turn: A Critique of Contemporary Democratic Theory By Ryan R. Holston.  State University of New York Press, 2023. Paperback, 218 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by Gene Callahan. Political theorists have recently devoted a great amount of...
Friends, Countrymen, Romans

Friends, Countrymen, Romans

Rome and America: Communities of Strangers, Spectacles of Belonging By Dean Hammer. Cambridge University Press, 2023.  Hardcover, 262 pages, $110.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. Since its inception, America has been many things, but, in a certain sense, it has always...