The Enduring Wisdom of Bryce
The Hindrances to Good Citizenship, by James Bryce. Introduction by Howard G. Schneiderman. Transaction Publishers, 1993. 186 pp., $36. The most revealing fact in James Bryce’s study of the impediments to good citizenship in a democracy, which Howard G. Schneiderman...A Forgotten American Horace
American Austen: The Forgotten Writing of Agnes Repplier by Agnes Repplier, Edited by John Lukacs. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009. Hardcover, 450 pages, $25. Who remembers Agnes Repplier? From her first essay in 1881 to her death in 1938 this half-Southern...
The Literary and Southern Schooling of ‘Mad Jack’ Randolph
The Education of John Randolph, by Robert Dawidoff. W. W. Norton & Co., 1979. Hardcover, 346 pp., $19.95. A good friend of mine, scion of an old Virginia family, when deep into his cups, regales me with stories of John Randolph of Roanoke. Late into the night,...What We’re Reading (Summer 2016)
From Newman to MacArthur and children’s drama to philosophy and poetry, our contributors and friends again provide their summer reading lists. Adam Schwartz C. S. Lewis once observed that a scholar’s professional and pleasure reading are often indistinguishable. I...
The Oral Tradition
Robert Penn Warren Talking: Interviews 1950–1978, edited by Floyd C. Watkins and John T. Hiers. Random House, 1980. Hardcover, 289 pp., $12.95.In the six decades since he began attending meetings of the Fugitive group as a seventeen-year-old Vanderbilt sophomore,...The Convict-Bourgeois
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann. Melville House, 2010. Paperback, 544 pages, $17.There’s a four-page passage early on in Hans Fallada’s masterful 1937 novel Wolf Among Wolves in which we meet a policeman. At first Leo Gubalke is a...
Solzhenitsyn Interpreted
Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980. Hardcover, 239 pages.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has something important to say to mankind—this is generally conceded, even though there is little agreement on what he has to...Upcoming APL Conference
The annual conference of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters will be held in Baltimore, MD on May 27–29. The theme for 2016 is “The Benedict Option: The Problems of Culture in Times of Crisis,” and there will also be a panel on “The Mecosta Option.” Bruce Frohnen...Don’t Fret Too Much About Success
Opening Belle: A Novel by Maureen Sherry. Simon & Schuster, 2016 Hardcover, 338 pp., $25.Books, especially first novels by new novelists in search of an audience, are marketed with a singular purpose. In order to attract sales and readership, they are classified...
I couldn't help but to think of some figures on X when I read this:
"Moreover, it is possible that Somer was, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet himself, both mad and acting mad—both a (semi-) natural fool as well as someone who constructed the exterior personality of a fool.
Jesse Russell…