An Elegy for Place and Time

An Elegy for Place and Time

On Homesickness: A Plea by Jesse Donaldson. Vandalia Press / West Virginia University Press, 2017. Paperback, 250 pages, $18. Reviewed by Jacob A. Bruggeman Robert Frost once wrote of a poem’s beginnings as “a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a...
Enlisting in Meaning

Enlisting in Meaning

Did You Kill Anyone? Reunderstanding My Military Experience As A Critique of Modern Culture by Scott Beauchamp Zero Books, 2020. Paperback, 144 pages, $17. Reviewed by Anthony M. Barr The first time I considered enlisting in the U.S. Navy, I was eighteen years old,...
Language, Chance, and Science

Language, Chance, and Science

The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language by John H. McWhorter. Oxford University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 208 pages, $20. Reviewed by Gene Callahan John H. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, and a fascinating and sometimes...
The Function of Criticism in a Time of Entropy

The Function of Criticism in a Time of Entropy

American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring By William Giraldi. Liveright, 2018. Hardcover, 462 pages, $30. Reviewed by Oliver Spivey William Giraldi, author of the critical prose collected in American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring, is that rarest of...
Psychedelic Utopia

Psychedelic Utopia

Outside Looking In: A Novel by T. C. Boyle Ecco, 2019. Hardcover, 400 pages, $28. Reviewed by Scott Beauchamp “Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person’s expense!” —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance It isn’t too much of a...