Enchanting Criticism: Dana Gioia as Literary Critic
Poetry as Enchantment: And Other Essays By Dana Gioia. Paul Dry Books, 2024. Paperback, 272 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Oliver Spivey. In his essay titled “Reading,” W. H. Auden sets forth what he views as the special duties of the literary critic: What is the function...
The Machine or the Garden?
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity By Paul Kingsnorth. Thesis/Penguin Random House, 2025. Hardcover, 368 pages, $32. Reviewed by Paul Krause. In the beginning was the garden. That is a very standard myth to start. Many cultures have foundation myths that...
What Plato Meant
Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political By Melissa Lane. Princeton University Press, 2023. Hardcover, 480 pages, $49.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. In October of 1993, a trial took place in Colorado regarding Colorado Amendment 2, a ballot measure that...
After the Republic: Tacitus on the End of a Free State
By Coyle Neal. Since the beginning, we Americans have been concerned about the end of our republican freedoms at the hands of a tyrant. Whether colonists decrying George III, anti-Federalists staring suspiciously at the Constitution, or Whigs wringing their hands over...
Why Cervantes’ Don Quixote Matters
By Pedro Blas Gonzalez. Plainness, Sancho, for all affectation is bad (Llaneza, Sancho, que toda afectación es mala). – Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes addresses perennial concerns about human nature and reality, the snare of confusing...
Rachel Hadas’s Pastorals mirrors the house within its pages—static, but, like the windows, each one provides a different view each time it is read, depending on the changes in the seasons and the weather of the reader’s life. Pastorals invites you in, shows you around, tells a
Rediscovering the lost ideal of leisure is highly worthwhile regardless of whether we are headed for a world in which humans need not apply for most jobs. Tabachnick’s book is a fruitful and thought-provoking exploration of how we might realize this ideal. - Robert Rich on THE