Fragments of Shattered Empire
Last Days in Old Europe: Trieste ’79, Vienna ’85, Prague ’89 By Richard Bassett. Allen Lane, 2019. Hardcover, 207 pages, $35. Reviewed by Kevin J. McNamara Empires demand histories as imperious as their subjects, but their aftermath, as this work by Richard Bassett...
More to Say on Slavery and the Constitution
No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding by Sean Wilentz. Harvard University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 368 pages, $27. Reviewed by Jason Ross The single most influential interpreter of the Convention that framed the Constitution is the...
The Third Tolkien on View
By Michael Toscano When Mabel Tolkien died on November 14, 1904, in a diabetic coma, her two sons, Ronald and Hilary, twelve and ten years of age, were passed to the legal guardianship of Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory, founded less than...
Members of the Club
The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age By Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 473 pages, $30. Reviewed by John C. Chalberg Better than a century ago G. K. Chesterton found much that was wrong with his world. In his...
An Invaluable Bit of Aquinas
The Human Person: A Beginner’s Thomistic Psychology by Steven J. Jensen. The Catholic University of America Press, 2018. Paperback, 296 pages, $35. Reviewed by Casey Chalk How would our society be different if all Americans had just a little bit of Thomas Aquinas?...
What We’re Reading, Summer 2019
A baker’s dozen of Bookman contributors and friends share their summer reading plans. Bruce Frohnen This summer I will read some about the state of our republic, and some about the state of our souls. Of course, the two are related. I hope to learn more about their...
A Prophet of Conservative Realism
Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution By Tucker Carlson. Free Press, 2018. Hardcover, 256 pages, $28. Reviewed by Sumantra Maitra Boris Johnson, before he turned to a goofy Mayor of London and subsequently the...
The Small and the Human, and ‘Free America’
The Bookman is pleased to present this excerpt from a forthcoming book, Land & Liberty: The Best of ‘Free America’, which is edited and introduced by Allan C. Carlson, with a preface by Sir Roger Scruton. It will be published by the Wethersfield Institute. By...
From New York to Chartres with La Farge
By Stephen Schmalhofer Sixteen days before Willa Cather died she wrote to Sigrid Undset lamenting “the strange deterioration in human beings” evident in the desire of seemingly every American “to want to live in New York City, drink cocktails, and wear outrageous...
Person Means Relation attempts “to find a more adequate way of speaking [about the person] that saves us from defaulting to the language of things...Someone” Walsh teaches "Is utterly different from something.” - @pricerobertg https://buff.ly/2367Eag @ubookman