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
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
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...
America’s Angriest Writer
Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck by William Souder. Norton, 2020. Hardcover, 464 pages, $32. Reviewed by Margot Enns In a key scene in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Cal, the darker, moodier brother, blackmails his brother, Aron, to keep quiet about Cal’s...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!