Reagan’s Consistent Cheerful Convictions
The Literary Reagan: Authentic Quotations from His Life By Nicholas Dujmovic. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. Hardcover, 346 pages, $88. Reviewed by William F. Meehan III Nicholas Dujmovic’s rationale for compiling and editing The Literary Reagan is clear: the...
Writer as Goad
Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman. Yale University Press, 2019 Hardcover, 264 pages, $26. Reviewed by Carl Rollyson Ben Hecht is one of those American writers who seems to have had a hand in everything. He was a Chicago newspaperman who also...
The Importance of Being Iris
Why Iris Murdoch Matters By Gary Browning. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Paperback, 272 pages, $27. Reviewed by Emina Melonic Philosophy and literature are often not very good bedfellows. For the most part, the novelist, or any artist, does not care about philosophy. It...
Nothing More to Prove
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965–2005 By Zachary Leader Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Hardcover, 784 pages, $40. Reviewed by Carl Rollyson I was hard on the first volume, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964, in the June 2015 issue of The New...
"A more than occasional glutton for punishment, Field dips into and out of conservative conferences, the better to enable herself to assert herself into this story. No doubt those on the left will be mostly pleased by what they read in these pages, while those on the right will
[F]or all their handwringing about the red-state barbarians at the gates, Chemerinsky and Gillman cannot or will not see what their own argument and their own evidence of student, faculty, and administrator behavior show to even a mildly attentive reader: The greatest enemies of