Magister
Last Rites by John Lukacs, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT) $25.00 hardcover, 2009 It is now twenty years since John Lukacs made his Confessions of an Original Sinner. Has time rolled ’round so soon for his Last Rites? That is the title of his second...Looking Over Their Shoulder: Orwell and the Intellectuals
Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings by John Rodden, University of Texas Press (Austin, Texas) 263 pp, $45.00, 2006 The title of Every Intellectual’s Big Brother seems to suggest that there is something malign about the...Mystery Bathed in Light
The Mind that Is Catholic. Philosophical and Political Essays, by James V. Schall, S.J. Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC) 337 pp, $34.95, 2008 . . . but nobody thought the whole commonwealth fell with the king, or that he alone had ultimate...Thinking in Pairs with Poets and Scientists
Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher by Peter J. Stanlis, ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware) 452 pp., $28.00, 2007 Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington by Matthew Stanley, University of Chicago Press (Chicago) 313 pp., $37.50 Cloth, 2007 There is a...In Search of a Better Economic System
God & Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism by Charles McDaniel, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, UK) 337 pp., $27.95, 2007 Every society, from the most primitive tribes to the modern post-industrial West,...Dark Ride: Thomas S. Hibbs on Film Noir and the Quest for Redemption
Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption by Thomas S. Hibbs, Spence Publishing $27.95 hardcover, 2008 Early postwar French critics trumped all others in identifying and taking active critical interest in the specifically American genre that they...Writer–Statesman
George Kennan: A Writing Life by Lee Congdon ISI Books (Wilmington, DE) xii + 208 pp., $25.00 cloth, 2008 If American history textbooks manage to find any space at all for George Kennan, they typically mention him as author of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” and as...Reading Peter Viereck Anew
Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals by Peter Viereck (Reprint Edition with an earlier preface by the author) Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, N.J.) 330 pp., $34.95 paper, 2007 Unadjusted Man in an Age of Overadjustment by Peter Viereck (Reprint Edition with a...New World Man
Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer, New York: Simon and Schuster,848 pp., $40.00, 2009In the 1830s Black Hawk, chief of the Sac and Fox nations, recalled one of his people’s earliest memories. Many years before, his ancestor in the St. Lawrence Valley had 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!