The Bloody (Congressional) Road to Disunion
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War By Joanne B. Freeman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Hardcover, 480 pages, $28. Reviewed by John Bicknell One could make the case that Yale professor Joanne Freeman is obsessed with people getting...
Confessions of a Jet-Set Conservative
The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right by Max Boot. Liveright, 2018. Hardcover, 288 pages, $25. Reviewed by Ben Sixsmith Max Boot, like newspaper columnist Jennifer Rubin, once claimed to be a conservative critic of President Donald Trump, but has become...
His Old Kentucky Home
Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President by James C. Klotter. Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover, xix + 506 pages, $35. Reviewed by Miles Smith When Abraham Lincoln called Henry Clay his beau ideal of a statesmen in the 1840s, he echoed respectable businessmen...
When Democracy Came, It Came in a Flurry
The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson By Mark R. Cheathem. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Paperback, 248 pages, $25. Reviewed by John Bicknell “I have been charmed to see that a presidential election now produces scarcely any...
"In an age when so many of our inherited institutions seem to be unraveling under the pressures of a restless, self-regarding individualism, it is a rare and welcome thing to encounter a book that speaks with quiet conviction about the things that have long sustained the American
"If classical teachers believe that truth, beauty, and goodness can indeed change the world, then the sort of student (and teacher and school) described by @AnthonyEsolen is a net gain for this world. And his Classical Catechism serves as a helpful tool in building the necessary