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 [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements If you were a fan, you might have experienced the death of singer Gordon Lightfoot last month in different ways depending on where you lived. Expressions of grief and mourning were a testament to his popularity on both sides of the 49th parallel and all over the world, but the tributes and reminiscences [...]
Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America Abraham Reisman (Atria Books, $39.99, 452 pages) Freelance writer Abraham Reisman has written a fascinating book with a misleading title, Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. It is common for pundits to make comparisons between the showbiz of professional wrestling and the celebrity style of modern politics, with some offering theories that [...]
Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language Arika Okrent (Oxford UP, $20.95, 264 pages) Linguist Arika Okrent has written a delightful book on the oddities of the English language, Highly Irregular. Okrent looks at hundreds of words and phrases that do not conform to the normal rules of spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and usage, [...]
Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements You’ll just have to trust me when I say that it was a very big deal when A.O. Scott, one of the New York Times’ two full-time movie critics, recently announced he was retiring from reviewing films. The news might not have reached you yet, so I’ll give you a minute to digest [...]
Rick McGinnis: Perhaps because no place makes us more anxious than the future, there’s a bottomless appetite for predictions about what happens next. Last year Peter Zeihan broke from the usual pack of prognosticators with The End of the World is Just Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, a thick but very readable book about the world-changing crisis he says has already [...]