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...
A Life for the Longfellow Renaissance
Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Knopf, 2020. Hardcover, 461 pages, $37.50. Reviewed by William F. Meehan III Henry Wadsworth Longfellow faded so far into American cultural memory that it is easy to forget he was the...
"Haven’s book is an engaging introduction to Girard. Reading through its presentation of the components and explanatory power of mimetic theory, it becomes clear Americans have arrived at a time for a very different kind of choosing."
"Knowing the truth about scapegoating does not mean it has been abandoned. Indeed, while people have become increasingly good at seeing the scapegoats of others as just that, scapegoats, they remain convinced their enemies really are evil."