What the Humanities Battle Is For

What the Humanities Battle Is For

The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today by Eric Adler. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 272 pages, $35. Reviewed by Jessica Hooten Wilson We’ve become accustomed to the “battle” language with regards to the...
Putting Burke into Action

Putting Burke into Action

Metternich: Strategist and Visionary by Wolfram Siemann. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 928 pages, $40. Reviewed by James Baresel Few nineteenth-century statesman are as famed for their positive contributions to Europe’s practical politics as...
Marriage Can Change Everything

Marriage Can Change Everything

Jack: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020. Hardcover, 320 pages, $27. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Why, I ask students who are reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, does John Ames never directly give us his wife’s name? It’s only learned late in the...
The Lakota: A Human Story

The Lakota: A Human Story

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Pekka Hämäläinen. Yale University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 544 pages, $35. Revivewed by Santi Ruiz On this year’s Indigenous People’s Day I encountered a curious phenomenon. My social circles are largely...
Holding a Wolf by the Ears

Holding a Wolf by the Ears

Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution by Jeff Broadwater. University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Hardcover, 296 pages, $30. Reviewed by Jason Ross No friendship in American history has been as consequential as that between Thomas Jefferson and...
A Life for the Longfellow Renaissance

A Life for the Longfellow Renaissance

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Knopf, 2020. Hardcover, 461 pages, $37.50. Reviewed by William F. Meehan III Henry Wadsworth Longfellow faded so far into American cultural memory that it is easy to forget he was the...