What Popper Saw in Churchill
The Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty: A View from Europe by João Carlos Espada. Routledge, 2016. Hardcover, 212 pages, $149.95. DANIEL J. MAHONEY The Portuguese political theorist João Espada has written a most thoughtful and instructive book on the political and...The Unwritten Constitution Today
Constitutional Morality and the Rise of the Quasi-Law by Bruce P. Frohnen and George W. Carey. Harvard University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 304 pages, $45. TED MCALLISTER One of the most serious questions of our time is whether the rise of the regulatory state has...
A Quiet American in Vietnam
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot. Liveright Publishing, 2018. Hardcover, 715 pages, $35. JOHN C. CHALBERG In this massive biography of Colonel Edward Lansdale, biographer Max Boot has given us the story of a quiet...
Tomboys and Magic
The creepy-cozy tales of John Bellairs. Eve Tushnet Children fell in love with the tales of John Bellairs (1938–1991) because they perfectly combined creepy and cozy: the laughing skeleton, curled up by the fire with a mug of cider. In novels like The Curse of the...Patiently Learning to Belong
Port William Novels & Stories: The Civil War to World War II by Wendell Berry. Library of America, 2018. Hardcover, 1018 pages, $40. This January, the Library of America released its first volume of Wendell Berry’s writings, Port William Novels & Stories (The...After Liberalism, Religion?
Holy Wars and Holy Alliance: The Return of Religion to the Global Political Stage by Manlio Graziano. Columbia University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 368 pages, $35. The liberal world order that we have complacently enjoyed for the last twenty-five years is...Everything We Knew Was Wrong
Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX by Andrew Willard Jones. Emmaus Academic, 2017. Hardcover, 510 pages, $40. Before Church and State, from the historian’s perspective, is undoubtedly a seminal work:...Public Relations Disaster
The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr by Leanda de Lisle. PublicAffairs, 2017. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30.What most of us know about the reign of Charles I we know by way of myth. From Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers we know of the warmongering...The Beauty of Order
The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition by James Matthew Wilson. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. Paperback, 352 pages, $30. Despite hitting a few bumps, poet James Matthew Wilson’s The Vision of the Soul delivers a...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!