Rick McGinnis: Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements If you go by what you read or the cultural mood today, we’re doomed. In spite of improvements in life expectation, overall wages, quality of life, consumer goods and nutrition – among a dozen other benchmarks – the sense that we are on the downward slope of a decline persists, a subjective intimation [...]
Paul Tuns, Review: Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice edited by George Delgado (Ignatius Press, $19.95, 254 pages) There is no better person to edit a collection of testimonials about Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) that its creator, Dr. George Delgado. In Abortion Pill Reversal: A Second Chance at Choice, Delgado describes how he came about inventing the “game changer” that gives [...]
I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton Dale Ahquist (Ignatius, $21.95 USD, 477 pages) Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist has assembled a unique “autobiography” of G.K. Chesterton by taking snippets from GKC’s vast body of writing and arranging them into a collage of sorts – Ahlquist says the quotes are “cobbled” together -- in lieu of an autobiography. (Chesterton [...]
The Prime Ministers: Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped J.D.M. Stewart (Sutherland House, $37.95, 361 pages) The last books on Canada’s prime ministers were published in the 1990s and while it is difficult to match Right Honourable Men by Michael Bliss, former high school teacher, J.D.M. Stewart has proven worthy of the task. History that focuses on politics or great men [...]
Sarah Stilton, Review: Newman and His Critics by Edward Short (Gracewing, $70 pb, 592 pages) Newman and his Contemporaries by Edward Short (Gracewing, $60 pb, 491 pages) Newman and his Family by Edward Short (Gracewing, $60 pb, 427 pages) Early in his career as a columnist, George F. Will said that his views could be known to anyone familiar with the Oxford Movement. I doubt [...]
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 [...]