Smithian Wisdom on Demand
Just Sentiments: 22 Smithian Essays Edited by Daniel B. Klein and Erik W. Matson. CL Press/Fraser Institute, 2024. Paperback, 262 pages, $7.50 (free PDF download) Reviewed by Michael Munger. Just Sentiments is a curated, teachable set of serious interpretive essays....
In Praise of Poetry and Form
The Great Game: Essays on Poetics By Amit Majmudar. Acre Books, 2024. Paperback, 288 pages, $18. Reviewed by Steven Knepper. Literature, Amit Majmudar warns, must never plod: “Plodding prose, plodding thought, rhythmless lifeless stuff you can’t step to: that’s...
Monster is the Machine
The Bovadium Fragments: Together with The Origin of Bovadium By J. R. R. Tolkien. William Morrow, 2025. Hardcover, 144 pages, $26.99. Reviewed by Ben Reinhard. When Russell Kirk decried the automobile as “a mechanical Jacobin”—a revolutionary naturally destructive of...
After the New Left: Rereading Breaking Ranks
By John C. “Chuck” Chalberg. The recent death of Norman Podhoretz prompted me to return to his “political memoir,” Breaking Ranks. Published in 1979, it deserves to be read or re-read today—and not simply as a historical account of his evolution from left to right...
Amici
Michelangelo and Titian: A Tale of Rivalry and Genius By William E. Wallace. Princeton University Press, 2026. Hardcover, 248 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. There is a running joke that Americans remain perpetually torn between Puritanism and pornography....
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