The World the Habsburgs Built

The World the Habsburgs Built

The Habsburgs: To Rule the World by Martyn Rady. Basic Books 2020. Hardcover, 416 pages, $32. Reviewed by Avi Woolf At their peak in the sixteenth century, they ruled much of the known world. A beacon of the true, universal Catholic faith to many, a source of sorrow...
Discouraging Charity

Discouraging Charity

Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms by Howard A. Husock. Encounter Books, 2019. Hardcover, 176 pages $24. Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl It’s a likely sign of the times. On a Tuesday last December, the phone rang with...
A Virus and a Fall of Rome

A Virus and a Fall of Rome

Scarpia by Piers Paul Read. Bloomsbury, 2016. Hardcover, 364 pages, $27. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill You could enjoy this novel about a young Sicilian rising through the ranks of Roman society in the 1790s without knowing anything about Puccini’s Tosca. It’s a...
The Rise of the State, the End of Enlightenment

The Rise of the State, the End of Enlightenment

Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution By Richard Whatmore. Princeton University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 512 pages, $37.52. Reviewed by Nayeli L. Riano We often consider the Treaty of Westphalia the beginning of the...
The Renaissance Reimagined

The Renaissance Reimagined

The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West by Catherine Fletcher. Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover, 384 pages, $30. Reviewed by Clayton Trutor Not all that long ago, the Renaissance was common cultural terrain in American life....