Enlightening the Masses
The Enlightenment That Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748–1830 by Jonathan I. Israel. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 942 pages, $45. Reviewed by Luke Nicastro To commemorate the second anniversary of the Bastille’s seizure, in July of...
Liberty, or Liberties, or Leviathan?
The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America’s Supreme Law by Joseph Tartakovsky. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 320 pages, $26. Reviewed by Jeffrey J. Folks Joseph Tartakovsky’s Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds that...
A Quarantine Reading Journal
Eric Hutchinson Charles Portis, Norwood Arkansas’s Charles Portis, most famous as the author of True Grit, died on February 17. Also in February, COVID-19 was spreading around the world. Of these two facts, the first calls for memorialization. The second calls for...
On Goats, and What to Do
How to Burn a Goat: Farming with the Philosophers By Scott H. Moore Baylor University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 224 pp., $29.95. Reviewed by Karl C. Schaffenburg In a brief volume of shorter meditations and several more extended essays, Scott H. Moore, a philosophy...
What Lasch Knew
The Topeka School: A Novel by Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Hardcover, 304 pages, $27. Reviewed by Jon K. Lauck Ben Lerner has written an intense new novel that will mark our cultural moment for some time, even in these strange days, but in ways that,...
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