The Literature of Wisdom and Enjoyment

The Literature of Wisdom and Enjoyment

On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Booksby Karen Swallow Prior. Brazos Press, 2018.Hardcover, 272 pages, $20. Reviewed by Daniel Buck Society needs literary critics. Time being a scarce resource, they help us to sift between the gold and the dross,...
A Singular Universal

A Singular Universal

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene. W. W. Norton, 2021. Hardcover, xvi + 591 pp., $40. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz Jean-Paul Sartre once classified Gustave Flaubert as a “singular universal.” For Sartre, such a writer’s oeuvre becomes a...
Have We Forgotten Solzhenitsyn?

Have We Forgotten Solzhenitsyn?

Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul and the West Edited by David P. Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson. University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. Hardcover, 400 pages, $60. Reviewed by Jeremy A. Kee The world is not changed by those whose voices are joined...
A Cautionary Tale for Our Loveless World

A Cautionary Tale for Our Loveless World

By Auguste Meyrat At the time of its publication in 1856, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert scandalized audiences by glamorizing adultery and ridiculing marriage and religion. The novel’s story is about Emma Roualt, the wife of a dimwitted country doctor, Charles...
Marriage Can Change Everything

Marriage Can Change Everything

Jack: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2020. Hardcover, 320 pages, $27. Reviewed by J. L. Wall Why, I ask students who are reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, does John Ames never directly give us his wife’s name? It’s only learned late in the...