The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 By Zachary Leader Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Hardcover, 784 pages, $40. Reviewed by Carl Rollyson I was hard on the first volume, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964, in the June 2015 issue of The New...
Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future By Jason Phillips. Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 320 pages, $35. Reviewed by Carl Lawrence Paulus “What is past is prologue.” William Shakespeare’s line from The Tempest is inscribed...
By Ryan J. Barilleaux Dystopia is all the rage these days. Not only does it make for hit television, in the form of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, but it is the concern of many popular fiction and Internet ruminations. Indeed, it...
Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And How to Heal by Ben Sasse St. Martin’s Press, 2018. Hardcover, 288 pages, $29. Reviewed by Anthony M. Barr Conservatives in twenty-first century America often fear an assortment of boogeymen that may or may not actually exist. Whether...
The Fall of Gondolin by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Hardcover, 304 pages, $30. Reviewed by Ben Reinhard The Fall of Gondolin is, appropriately enough, the story of endings: the end of the mythical kingdom, to be...
From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faithby Sohrab Ahmari. Ignatius Press, 2019. Hardcover, 240 pages, $23. Reviewed by Matthew Hennessey If you’re going to write a book about your religious conversion it’d better be a great yarn. And if you’re going to...
