The Traditions That Gave Us Homer
Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry By Robert Kanigel. Knopf, 2021. Hardcover, 336 pages, $28.95. Reviewed by J. L. Wall. It can be difficult to escape the image of Homer as blind bard and near-inventor of human literature. Just glance at...
Whose Truth? Whose Power?
Slave State: Rereading Orwell’s 1984 by David Lowenthal. St. Augustine’s Press, 2021. Paperback, 100 pages, $14. Reviewed by Robert Grant Price. It is impossible to mention George Orwell’s name, let alone write about him (i.e., such and such is “Orwellian”), without...
Two Tales of Watergate
Watergate: A New History By Garrett M. Graff. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2022. Hardcover, 832 pages, $35. The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President By Geoff Shepard. Bombardier Books, 2021. Hardcover, 384 pages, $30. Reviewed...
These Roman Things
David Jones and Rome: Reimagining the Decline of Western Civilization by Jasmine Hunter Evans. Oxford University Press, 2022. Hardcover, 432 pages, $115. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz. In 1964, poet-painter David Jones lamented changes underway in the Roman Catholic...
All That’s Left is This Foundation Stone
The Commonwealth: Poems By Dan Rattelle. Little Gidding Press, 2022. Paperback, 34 pages, $9.99. Reviewed by Joshua Hren. Wordsworth’s complaint in the Lyrical Ballads Preface (1800) might well have been written last Tuesday at 2:00 a.m. (lost already among too many...
A pleasure to review @joldmcginn's fine book, WHY DEMOCRACY NEEDS THE RICH.
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/how-should-we-think-about-inequality/
With thanks to my man, @lsheahan, who is giving @ubookman some "oomph" these days.
The radical materialist culture of the last two hundred years, equally common to both the Communist East and the capitalist West, has brought in its wake a high degree of material and technological advancement, with many obvious benefits for mankind. - William Scott on Aleksandr