Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, The Wickedest Man in Europe John Callahan (Princeton, $48, 315 pages): Bernard Mandeville was a self-exiled Dutch writer who found his work on the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Banned Books). The libertarian writer is most famous for The Fable of the Bees, a book which stood trial in 1723 in Middlesex [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements Lately I’ve been getting served a rush of media asking the question “Is the world getting worse?” in the form of online articles, Twitter/X threads, blog posts and YouTube videos. Most of the blame goes to social media and the spread of “misinformation,” which has made us angrier, less hopeful and increasingly distrustful [...]
Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre Mark Bourrie (Bibliosis, $28.95 paperback, 437 pages): Anyone wanting to know why Pierre Poilievre lost the 2025 federal election need go any further than Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, which could be more accurately titled Ripper: The Making and Unmaking of Pierre Poilievre. While Bourrie has a clear and admitted anti-Poilievre bias, and [...]
Hope: The Autobiography Pope Francis (Random House, $42, 302 pages) Hope: The Autobiography was not written by Pope Francis but rather its “co-author” Carlo Musso, an Italian journalist who held numerous conversations with the Holy Father and scoured the documentary records of his pontificate. It was not to be published until after the death of Francis but was released shortly before his [...]
Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution Eric Kaufmann (Crown, $45 hc, $27 pb, 394 pages) Version 1.0.0 Eric Kaufmann is perhaps the foremost theorist of the great awokening – even more so than Christopher Rufo – and his definition of woke is unsurpassed: “the sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups.” The prioritizing of [...]
A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims: The Ugly Truth about Stakeholder Capitalism Andrew F. Puzder (Encounter, $45.99,. 335 pages) Andrew Puzder is a former CEO of a CKE Restaurants (which owns Carl’s Jr and Hardees) and commentator on economic affairs. In A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims: The Ugly Truth about Stakeholder Capitalism he examines the corporate commitment [...]
On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law Edited by Russell Hittinger and Scott J. Roniger (Catholic University of America Press, $52, 490 pages) Russell Hittinger and Scott Roniger have edited a compendium of Hittinger’s previously published articles on Catholic social teaching and natural law that is both scholarly and accessible. Collectively, the essays show that human dignity is [...]
Donald DeMarco, Review: How We Got Here: A Guide to Our Anti-Christian Culture by Jonathon Van Maren (Christian Heritage Press, 311 pages, $25) Version 1.0.0 “Our world is utterly different from the one that existed just a few decades ago. But how did this happen? Why did everything change?” These words provide the focus of this important book. The author, Jonathon [...]
Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All at Once: Tristan Hopper (Sutherland House, $22.95, 126 pages) National Post writer Tristan Hopper has written a recent history of Canada that serves as a warning for the rest of the world. Recently, Canadians have enjoyed a splurge of patriotism in reaction to U.S. President Donald Trump, but Hopper says we should [...]
God on Stage: 15 Plays that Ask the Big Questions Peter Kreeft (Word on Fire, $32.50, 216 pages): Peter Kreeft’s God on Stage examines 15 plays, three each on five different themes (life and joy, relationship with God, suffering, death, damnation), one that is pre-Christian, one Christian, and one that is post-Christian. Kreeft says “reading and reflecting on great dramas, great plays, [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: The Mystery of Joy by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius, $18.95, 241 pages) Version 1.0.0 Peter Kreeft’s latest book offers 95 pensées about joy, short, (two to four page) thoughts on what joy is, and isn’t. Joy, says Kreeft, “is to happiness what happiness is to pleasure: the next step up.” According to Kreeft, way up, up to heaven. He [...]
T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy: James Matthew Wilson (Wiseblood Books, USD$8, 66 pages) T.S. Eliot is probably the greatest literary and social critic of the 21st century, as well as one of its greatest poets. There is no shortage of treatments of his work, but James Matthew Wilson’s T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy is a worthy edition to any library. Eliot was [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn (Notre Dame University Press, $38, 195 pages) The novelist and essayist Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is best-known as a Soviet dissident who spent time in communist concentration camps known as the gulag, of which he became their most famous chronicler. He is one of [...]
From the editor’s desk: We live in an age in which far too many people live lives of anguish because they lack meaning or are searching for it in the wrong places. In Be not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James (Princeton, $24.99, 377 pages), John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle say that seekers looking for meaning could do [...]
The Meese Revolution: The Making of a Constitutional Moment Steven Gow Calabresi and Gary Lawson (Encounter, $52, 468 pages) In 1985, Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese III addressed the annual meeting of the American Bar Association when he said that under his leadership the Department of Justice would “resurrect the original meaning of the constitutional provisions and statutes as the only [...]