On Being a Basel Professor
On Essays and LettersIn Walter Kaufmann’s chronology of Nietzsche’s life, under 1889, it states briefly, that “Nietzsche becomes insane early in January in Turin.” Insanity, evidently, is no impediment to writing letters. Chesterton said that the maniac was the man...Defining the Middle East
The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East. By Walid Phares. Threshold Editions, 2010. Cloth, 400 pages, $26“Revolution is coming to Middle Earth.” So wrote Dr. Walid Phares prophetically and appropriately on July 4, 2010, in the afterword of his...The Art of Intimacy
The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1974. $15.00 Of those sources ordinarily consulted by literary historians and critics, letters are surely among...Undoing the Ties that Bind
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray. New York: Crown Forum, 2012, 416 pp., hardcover, $27. In America, it is currently difficult to define what it means to be an American. Not anecdotally, as in “what does it mean to you?” or “what...What Holds America Together?
The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1974. [Revised edition: ISI 2003, 534 pages]The President of a great American university told me not long ago that most of his students shared the opinion of Mr. Henry...Kirk in Time
In an article in the February 13, 2012 TIME magazine, “The Conservative Identity Crisis,” the author says that “modern conservatism was born in the early 1950s” when “a young writer named Russell Kirk unearthed a rich philosophical tradition going back to British...Defending the Humane Tradition
The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, edited by Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter. ISI Books, 2011. Cloth, 336 pages, $30. Reviewed by Tobias J. Lanz Wendell Berry is one of America’s most ardent defenders of the humane tradition—one of the few viable alternatives...
The Private World of Unamuno
An Historical Note and Commentary. The Private World in Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, in seven volumes. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan; edited and annotated by Anthony Kerrigan and Martin Nozick. Bollingen Series; Princeton University Press, 1967–1985.“We are...Eliot Through His Letters
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. II: 1923–1925 (U.S. Edition) edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. Yale University Press, 2011. 878 pp. $45. Since the first volume of Eliot’s letters (1898–1922) appeared in 1988, scholars and enthusiasts waited impatiently for...
A Christmas Carol is great literature. Ghosts are a must for Christmas.