The Unwritten Constitution
A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty by Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch II. University Press of Kansas, 2019. Hardcover, 216 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Luke C. Sheahan C. S. Lewis famously warned that “the...
Great Power Competition Is Like a Bad Designer Drug
We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power by Jason Blakely. Oxford University Press, 2020. Paperback, 184 pages, $28. Reviewed by Anthony M. Barr It is perhaps the most infamous quotation from the George W. Bush years. Karl Rove has...
What Makes a Life
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel by Christopher Beha. Tin House Books, 2020. Hardcover, 528 pages, $28. Reviewed by Jessica Hooten Wilson This is a story that begins with the end of the world. As a young man named Sam Waxworth arrives from “the provinces”...
Stuck with Pound
Cathay: A Critical Edition by Ezra Pound, Edited by Timothy Billings. Fordham University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 364 pages, $35. The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017, Hardcover, 320 pages, $27....
A Virus and a Fall of Rome
Scarpia by Piers Paul Read. Bloomsbury, 2016. Hardcover, 364 pages, $27. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill You could enjoy this novel about a young Sicilian rising through the ranks of Roman society in the 1790s without knowing anything about Puccini’s Tosca. It’s a...
"Delsol’s analysis stands out for the breadth of its perspective. Her essay covers topics as varied as corporatism, the French love for status and strikes, immigration, religion and secularism, populism and the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, and the EU..."