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 [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso (Simon & Schuster, $39.99, 307 pages) Concerns about rapidly declining fertility rates are mostly expressed by those on the right-end of the political spectrum. Pro-natalism is unfairly conflated with ideas of Christian nationalist and right-wing populism in political discourse even though the prospect [...]
Paul Tuns, Review Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics by Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp (University of Chicago Press, $42.50 pb, 223 pages) In their book Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics, Paul Goren, director of the Center for the Study of Political Psychology [...]
From Calvinist to Catholic Peter Kreeft (Ignatius, $28.95, 192 pages) These pages review a lot of Peter Kreeft books because Kreeft, a Catholic, writes a lot of books, most of which are easily recommendable to everyone open to faith and reason. At the age of 88, Kreeft has published his autobiography, From Calvinist to Catholic, but it is not a complete autobiography, [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Socrates Meets Box Set (Word on Fire, $139.95 USD, eight volumes, 1712 pages) Between 2003 and 2014, the prolific author Peter Kreeft published eight books in which he imaginatively has Socrates interrogate eight famous philosophers: Macchiavelli, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Marx, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Sartre. Now, for the first time, these eight books have been collected in a (handsome) boxset [...]
Classic Literature Made Simple: Fifty Great Books in a Nutshell Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press, $17.95 USD, 227 pages Great Books for Good Men: Reflections on Literature and Manhood Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press, $17.95 USD, 153 pages Joseph Pearce, author of numerous literary studies and editor of the St. Austin Review, has had published two similar but distinct books on great literature. In [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: James Burnham: An Intellectual Biography by David T. Byrne (Northern Illinois University Press, $45.95, 242 pages) James Burnham, like many of those on the political Right in the second half of the 20th century, migrated there from the Left. Historian David T. Byrne examines the intellectual journey of this foundational conservative thinker from literary critic and Trotskyite philosopher to one [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Man who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel Flynn (Encounter, $54.99, 544 pages) Frank Meyer is the most important conservative whose name you never heard. Perhaps more than anyone not named William F. Buckley, he shaped American conservatism to adopt the seemingly contradictory stances of promoting a socially dynamic economic freedom with respect for [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House, $54, 1018 pages) The conservative columnist George F. Will says that before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, that before that there was Goldwater there was National Review magazine, and before NR there was its founder William F. Buckley. Buckley was without doubt, the most influential [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements On May 20, 2020, just two months into the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, New York governor Andrew Cuomo gave one of his daily press conferences – a “state of the plague” address of sorts, reliably covered in the legacy media. (He would win an Emmy for “masterful use of television to inform and calm [...]
A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century Louise Perry (Polity, $19.95, 165 pages) In 2022, feminist journalist Louise Perry wrote The Case against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, which poignantly prosecuted the case against the notion that the Sexual Revolution liberated women. She has updated and adapted her book to gear it toward [...]
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company Patrick McGee (Scribner, $43, 437 pages) Journalist Patrick McGee reports in his book Apple in China, about how one of the world’s largest companies, Apple, maker of the iPhone and other ubiquitous consumer gadgets, “bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian state” – that of Red China. McGee, a former Wall [...]
After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher Thomas M. Ward (Word on Fire, $36, 201 pages) In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Stoicism, from academic publications to YouTube videos, about Zeno, Marcus Aureliu and Seneca, among others. There is much to recommend in Stoicism, an ancient Greek philosophy that taught that virtue is the highest good [...]
Mark Twain Ron Chernow (Penguin, $60, 1174 pages) Ron Chernow, biographer of J.P Morgan, Alexander Hamilton and Ulysses S. Grant, has turned his attention to the most American of authors, Mark Twain. Chernow describes Twain, born Samuel Clemons in 1835, and his search for fame and fortune in a thoroughly researched, rich, and brisk-moving 1100-page biography. Chernow says that Twain “thrust himself [...]