Paul Tuns, Review: The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa S. Kearney (University of Chicago Press, $32.50, 225 pages) For the second time in two years, a long-time argument made by conservatives became mainstream following the publication of a book that digs deep into the data about a social phenomenon that had previously been both controversial [...]
From the editor’s desk Two recent books, both published by Broadside Books, delve into the roots of today’s woke ideology to describe its origins and march “through the institutions” as Antonio Gramsci called for: The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and The Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania ($39.50, 270 pages) and America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical [...]
Life to the Full: True Stories that Reveal the Dignity of Every Human Life Edited by Abby Johnson and Tyler Rowley (Ignatius Press, $16.95 pb or ebook, 178 pages) Life to the Full is a collection of more than 20 first-person accounts by women and doctors as they confront the reality of abortion. Many of the stories are chilling and this is [...]
Oswald Clark, Review: Tyranny Inc. by Sohrab Ahmari (Forum Books, $37.99, 252 pages) There is much material to support the promising subtitle of Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, Tyranny Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty and What to Do About It but Ahmari focuses completely on aspect of supposedly tyrannical companies: their treatment of employees. Readers who know Ahmari as a critic of [...]
The Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse Chosen and introduced by Edward Short (Gracewing, $35, 350 pages) The poet Dana Gioia writes in his introduction to Edward Short’s anthology, “this brief and inadequate survey is offered to demonstrate the powerful continuity of Christian poetry in English” as “our literary canon is suffused with religious consciousness, which has expressed itself in ways beyond [...]
Twelve Great Books: Going Deeper into Classic Literature Joseph Pearce (Ignatius Press, $17.95, 226 pages) Joseph Pearce, a well-known literary critic and biographer of Christian novelists, in Twelve Great Books highlights great books as part of our intellectual and spiritual inheritance – in short, part of our civilization. We read these books, says Pearce, to “find ourselves in the presence of Great [...]
The Art of Being Human Michael S. Rose (Angelico Press, $17.95, 146 pages) Michael S. Rose’s The Art of Being Human: What ‘Old Books’ Can Tell Us (and Warn Us) About Living in the 21st Century examines 18 books and one (George Orwell) essay that serve as cautionary tales on science, transhumanism, and totalitarianism. The stories range from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and [...]
Reading for the Love of God Jessica Hooten Wilson (Brazos Press, $30.99, 193 pages) Jessica Hooten Wilson’s Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice laments that Christians stopped “being considered a bookish people – a people who revered words,” to eschew history, philosophy, and literature as they are focused solely on the Word of God. She [...]
The Novel, Who Needs It by Joseph Epstein (Encounter, $25.99, 142 page) Paul Tuns Cards on the table: Joseph Epstein is one of my favourite authors. I have more than 20 of his books on my shelves, most of them collections of literary essays. His essays on authors have led me to read hundreds of books I might not otherwise have bothered [...]
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements It might be easier to be optimistic about the future if we published more mea culpas – books like Robert D. Kaplan’s recent The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power, in which the author confesses to a heavy conscience in the wake of what he considers two errors of judgment that ended [...]
Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800 Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden (Princeton University Press, $50, 261 pages) Economics historians Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten have written an excellent book on the development of capitalism that is steeped in history, economics, sociology, and theology. The authors show that free markets grew locally, where merchants were able to limit or escape from [...]
Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality David Edmonds (Princeton, $40, 380 pages) Oxford University philosophy professor Derek Parfit is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the last half century but is barely known outside academia. He made important contributions to questions such as identity and freedom, but might be best known for his ideas about future [...]
Paul Tuns: The Story of Abortion in America by Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas (Crossway, $53, 494 pages) Marvin Olasky, author of the Tragedy of American Compassion and Abortion Rites, and Leah Savas, who writes about abortion for World magazine, have written a remarkable work of scholarship, a deep dive into what the subtitle promises, “A Street-Level History, 1652-2022,” of abortion. The [...]
Oswald Clark, Review: Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America by Michael Lind (Portfolio, $39, 213 pages) Conservative writer Michael Lind has followed up his book The New Class War which looked at the trans-Atlantic West through the prism of the growing economic and cultural gap between the university-educated overclass and the working class, with Hell to Pay, a [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads: Essays from The New Criterion Edited by Roger Kimball (Encounter, $28, 234 pages) The New Criterion is an essential conservative review of the culture today, focused on the visual arts, music, books, and the goings-on in academia. Every few years they have a year-long series in their monthly journal dedicated to a particular [...]