Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! —Sir Walter Scott This work reminds me, on an appropriately more modest scale, of John Lukacs’s book on Philadelphians. Both hearken back to a time when Americans were a semicivilized people who lived in...
For many, Pope Francis is still a puzzlement, to use the words of the song from that great musical The King and I. If you are among those puzzled, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. The Great Reformer presents the man, the experiences that shaped him, and his responses to those experiences with...
H.M. Maisky was the Soviet ambassador to Britain from 1932 to 1943. In June 1943 Stalin ordered him to quit London. After returning to Moscow, Maisky was posted henceforth to unimportant positions. In 1953 he was imprisoned; two years later he was released. He died in 1955. In London (and from time to time in...
In her tenth volume of poetry, Catharine Savage Brosman has given readers a wide array of skillfully written and insightful poems that capture the poet’s keen observations of nature, her journeys from New Mexico to Antarctica, and her sense of humor and wit. Framed by travel adventures in the United States and a series of...
Who is to decide? This question animated Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who died of natural causes in mid-February. He was the longest-serving member of the current Supreme Court. Nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia was known for his acerbic wit and fidelity to the text of the Constitution, as understood by those who ratified...
