Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk (Oxford, $33, 148 pages) Sociologists Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk distill American research based on 215 in-depth personal interviews and two surveys of a nationally representative sample of parents to determine what it takes for religious parents to inculcate their children in their [...]
The Story of the Family: G.K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens edited by Dale Ahlquist (Ignatius, $17.95, 237 pages) Paul Tuns Review Despite writing a century ago about the maladies afflicting the family and thus the whole of society, G.K. Chesterton still seems relevant, an insightful critic of the intellectual, economic, and cultural challenges that [...]
The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun: by Noah Rothman (Broadside Books, $36, 300 pages) Paul Tuns Review Noah Rothman, an associate editor at the Jewish monthly magazine Commentary and author of Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, has turned his eye to the modern left’s puritanical moralizing and asceticism in a fun jaunt [...]
Oceans of Grain: Scott Reynolds Nelson (Basic, $40, 356 pages) World food prices are currently affected by the war in Ukraine, which is sometimes called the breadbasket of the world. The importance of the wheat trade should not be underestimated and a useful tonic to such faulty thinking is Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Oceans of Grain. Nelson argues that wheat – never mind [...]
M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom: by Steven F. Hayward (Encounter, $45, 391 pages) Paul Tuns Review Steven Hayward’s new biography of M. Stanton Evans is overdue; he was a giant in the U.S. conservative movement but he remains criminally under-appreciated. Evans graduated from Yale shortly after William Buckley did and quickly began serving the movement from both inside and [...]
The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery: Ross Douthat (Convergent, $35, 200 pages) Ross Douthat, the house conservative of the New York Times, is author of six books, the latest being The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, his harrowing tale of contracting a chronic form of Lyme disease, a bacterial infection acquired from deer-tick bites. Douthat’s doctors [...]
Review: Jacob Mchangama (Basic Books, $40, 514 pages) Jacob Mchangama’s massive but readable and spirited defense of Free Speech is a must-read for anyone interested in this important and increasingly contentious topic. Mcchangama notes that free speech’s origins go back further than the U.S. First Amendment or the Enlightenment. Rather, they have roots in antiquity. Pericles, he notes, extolled the virtues of [...]
From the editor’s desk: You probably saw that during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, she refused to answer what a woman is. Joe Biden appointed Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court because she was a black woman, the sole qualification Biden outlined for his first Supreme Court appointment when he was running for president. Asked if she agreed with the late Justice [...]
Jed Perl (Knopf, $27, 161 pages): Long-time critic Jed Perl (The New York Review of Books, The New Republic) has slim new volume, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts that is being described in many reviews as a salvo against relevancy. Perl, say these reviewers, defends art-for -art’s sake. Up to a point that this is true. Roger Scruton says [...]
Paul Tuns Review: Roger Scruton, an English philosopher who died in 2020, wrote more than 50 books on topics such as art, politics, and philosophy. He started a serious intellectual journal (The Salisbury Review), and established underground academic networks in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. He was knighted in 2016, received three awards of distinction in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements While writing my recent review of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book, I couldn’t help but notice some conspicuous omissions from the catalogue of pop culture and political events the writer referenced in the book. I could understand why he might overlook important events that took place outside the United States – Klosterman’s [...]
A History of Canadian Fiction David Staines (Cambridge University Press, $126.95, 304 page) David Staines, a professor of English at the University of Ottawa and editor of the New Canadian Library, provides a good overview of English fiction in Canada (although there is nothing on French-language fiction and the author does not even try to justify the omission). As much as one [...]
The Library - A Fragile History: Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen (Basic Books, $44, 518 pages) Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, a pair of Scottish historians, attempt – and succeed – to provide a history of the library from ancient times to today, and explain its importance. Ultimately, libraries are important because books are important, with Pettegree and der Weduwen [...]
Whatever Happened to Tradition: History, Belonging, and the Future of the West by Tim Stanley (Bloomsbury Continuum, $38, 266 pages) Tradition and especially traditionalism has a bad reputation. It is often conflated with the old-fashioned and nostalgia, which barely begin to scratch the surface of the richness of tradition. Tim Stanley, an editorial writer for the Daily Telegraph in London comes to [...]
100 Poets: A Little Anthology by John Carey (Yale University Press, $32.50, 268 pages): Oxford professor emeritus John Carey is the author of The Little History of Poetry and biographies of John Donne and Charles Dickens. His latest book is 100 Poets: A Little Anthology, a fun little collection of representative samples from important poets. The list runs roughly chronologically, beginning with [...]