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 [...]
King: A Life Jonathan Eig (Picador, $31, 669 pages) Martin Luther King Jr. is probably the most famous civil rights leader in American history and as such biographies tend toward hagiography. Jonthan Eig’s King: A Life, released in hardcover in 2023 and paperback earlier this year, avoids that mistake, offering a rich and deep exploration of the slain civil rights leader. Eig, [...]
Catholic Heroes of Civil and Human Rights: 1800-Present Matthew Daniels and Roxanne King (Ignatius, $18.95, 205 pages) In Catholic Heroes of Civil and Human Rights Matthew Daniels and Roxanne King profile 16 Catholics who championed civil and human rights in different parts of the world (although mostly the United States) and in different eras. What all 16 men and women have in [...]
Paul Tuns, Review I … Do? Why Marriage Still Matters by Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell (Cascade Books, 115 pages, $30 paperback) Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell are with the Canadian Christian think tank Cardus and their recent book I … Do? is an important and timely little tract on the why marriage matters – or more accurately, why it is [...]
Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn Christoher Cox (Simon & Schuster, $46.00, 615 pages) Former Congressman Christopher Cox has written a critical biography of Woodrow Wilson, who served as president from 1913-1921 and remains, as Cox says in his introduction, “enormously consequential.” Cox outlines Wilson’s energetic presidency which sought to have government’s tentacles reach every corner of the nation but he does not [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: No One Left: Why the World Needs Children by Paul Morland (Forum, $32, 264 pages) Despite a growing number of countries experiencing rapidly declining fertility rates and falling natural population growth (that is, growth without immigration), there are still policymakers and thought leaders that insist that population growth is a problem. Paul Morland has been banging the drum on depopulation [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements First Nations issues are evergreen in Canadian politics, rising to prominence regularly, like during the battle over the Meech Lake Accord in the late ‘80s, when Manitoba MLA Elijah Harper and his eagle feather helped scuttle any attempted constitutional amendment (and got Harper elected as an MP shortly after). It was a major [...]
American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism Ned Ryun (Encounter, $25.99, 159 pages) Ned Ryun, founder of American Majority and Voter Gravity, has written a stinging overview of the origins and growth of the so-called Deep State, the class of bureaucrats that have come to rule American society. Ryun shows how bureaucratic rule quickly becomes authoritarian rule. The [...]
Sarah Stilton, Review: Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws: A Critical Edition Edited by W. B. Allen (Anthem Press, $215, 954 pages) There are Marxists and Lockeans, Nietzscheans and Aristotelians but there are no Montesquieuans. The knock against Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu is that he created no system, that he was not a theorizer. Montesquieu is considered a [...]
The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression Edited by Tony Banout and Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago Press, $26, 228 pages) The University of Chicago is justly famous for its defense of freedom of expression and free inquiry against the censorious barbarians at the gates of academia, and within it. Over the past decade, as many universities set out to provide [...]
A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity Michael Cook (Princeton, $54, 895 pages) Michael Cook, a professor of Near-Eastern Studies in Princeton and author of numerous books on Islam, has written a massive, wide-ranging history of the Muslim world, from Muhammad’s birth in the sixth century through is spread over most of the Old World, [...]
The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020 Diarmaid Perriter (Profile, $47, 552 pages) Diarmaid Perriter is a professor of Irish history at University College in Dublin and a columnist for the Irish Times and at times his latest history of Ireland – he has written 14 books on Ireland – seems more journalism than history. That is certainly due to fact that this “history” [...]