Priscilla West (Encounter, $12.95, 62 pages) If you think the war on woke is winning, especially in education, as some excesses are reversed, you must read The New Face of Woke Education. Priscilla West illustrates how Social Emotional Learning is rampant throughout schools, “weaponiz(ing) empathy, using emotional appeals to smuggle radical ideology into classrooms under colorful banners of compassion.” West exposes an [...]
Jean M. Twenge (Atria, $26 pb, 215 pages) Jean Twenge delivers on the subtitle of her book 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World which is “How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media, and Gaming from Taking Over Their Children’s Lives.” The ubiquity of smart phones, tablets, laptops, and other devices made it practically inevitable that parents and schools would [...]
The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters Diane Coyle (Princeton, $41, 306 pages) Economist Diane Coyle argues that traditional economics metrics like Gross Domestic Product and the System of National Accounts, important as they were in helping policy-makers and economists understand material well-being, are inadequate to measure complex modern economies and thus economists are unable to answer the vital question: “Are things [...]
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $56 hc or $38 pb in August, 531 pages) Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have written a remarkable biography of a poet, Constantine Cavafy, who lived, in their own admission, an unremarkable life, by writing it thematically rather than linearly. Cavafy was born into a Greek family in Alexandria, [...]
Russell E. Kuykendall, Review: The Omnipotent Child: How to Mold, Strengthen, and Perfect the Developing Child, Fourth Edition by Thomas P. Millar MD (New Westminster, B.C.: Palmer Press, 2005. 241 pp.) Version 1.0.0 In his first edition of The Omnipotent Child in 1983, the child psychiatrist Thomas Millar took on the still-popular approach to child-rearing: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements At the core of Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s new book Breaking Point: The New Big Shifts Putting Canada at Risk is a simple truth that doesn’t get repeated enough. “Canada is not a love story,” they write. “It is a marriage of convenience, a survival strategy conceived a century and a half [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Two Greatest Novels Ever Written: The Wisdom of The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov by Peter Kreeft (Word on Fire, $24.95 USD, 164 pages) Philosopher Peter Kreeft says that J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (BK) are not merely masterpieces but the two greatest novels ever written because [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Some of us might have woken up with a shock recently to discover that we are already a quarter of the way through the 21st century. By this point in the last century the old monarchies of Europe had made themselves extinct after a world war of unprecedented carnage, one of them had embarked on [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements If you go by what you read or the cultural mood today, we’re doomed. In spite of improvements in life expectation, overall wages, quality of life, consumer goods and nutrition – among a dozen other benchmarks – the sense that we are on the downward slope of a decline persists, a subjective intimation [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice edited by George Delgado (Ignatius Press, $19.95, 254 pages) There is no better person to edit a collection of testimonials about Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) that its creator, Dr. George Delgado. In Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice, Delgado describes how he came about inventing the “game changer” that gives [...]
I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton Dale Ahquist (Ignatius, $21.95 USD, 477 pages) Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist has assembled a unique “autobiography” of G.K. Chesterton by taking snippets from GKC’s vast body of writing and arranging them into a collage of sorts – Ahlquist says the quotes are “cobbled” together -- in lieu of an autobiography. (Chesterton [...]
The Prime Ministers: Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped J.D.M. Stewart (Sutherland House, $37.95, 361 pages) The last books on Canada’s prime ministers were published in the 1990s and while it is difficult to match Right Honourable Men by Michael Bliss, former high school teacher, J.D.M. Stewart has proven worthy of the task. History that focuses on politics or great men [...]
Sarah Stilton, Review: Newman and His Critics by Edward Short (Gracewing, $70 pb, 592 pages) Newman and his Contemporaries by Edward Short (Gracewing, $60 pb, 491 pages) Newman and his Family by Edward Short (Gracewing, $60 pb, 427 pages) Early in his career as a columnist, George F. Will said that his views could be known to anyone familiar with the Oxford Movement. I doubt [...]
Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education Richard K. Vedder (Independent Institute, $39.95, 230 pages) It is axiomatic that you get what you paid for, except perhaps in post-secondary education where universities get bailed out by governments or donors and incentives and such that professors care more about research than teaching. Richard K. Vedder, founding director of the [...]
"I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer”: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column Mary Beth Norton (Princeton, $34, 203 pages) In the 1690s, John Dunton published a two-page broadsheet, the Athenian Mercury, a double-sided broadsheet that was “the world’s first advice column,” answering queries from anonymous writers and responded to by the paper’s anonymous Athenian Society of [...]