“Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.” —Vittorio Alfieri, Oreste (1785) This volume is the first complete English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry—a cause for rejoicing. And, although Alissa Valles’s translations are a bit gray, as if sprinkled with fine dust, they are invariably precise and never overstated. While there...
The- Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia. The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run. The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full of rocks, with open spaces so small that vegetable gardens...
The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was arguably the most significant event in the Catholic Church in the 20th century. No other issue has had such wide-ranging effects on Catholics throughout the world, and none (excepting, perhaps, contraception) is debated with as much vigor among Catholics today, more than 40 years later. Although it was the...
“Out of the sacred space the sacred text would grow,” says Mr. Boritt. He’s right; those of us who grew up as Yankees know in our bones that our country is sacred ground. I took my wife to Gettysburg on our honeymoon. My uncle Joe (a federal judge appointed by Eisenhower) made a pilgrimage there...
“If a woman of her own accord drops that which is in her, they shall crucify her and not bury her.” —The Assyrian Code, c. 2000 B.C. Ancient history is worth keeping in mind when confronting the claims of the pro- and anti-abortion and euthanasia camps, since both tend to couch their arguments in terms...
Most people throughout the industrial world see cheap and readily available food as simply another modern amenity, such as electricity or running water. Few understand that agriculture has always been political, because it is tied to human survival. Even fewer know that the world is currently undergoing one of the greatest agrarian revolutions in history:...
By comparing America to the empires of the ancient world and Europe, Charles Maier has attempted to answer the question, Is America an empire? While his book reveals an author of immense learning, Among Empires is unsatisfying, not only because Maier answers his question in the negative—after presenting a great deal of evidence that seems...
There is no question that the concept of manhood is a shell of what it once was. In popular culture, men are depicted as being slightly dim-witted, obsessed with video games, sports, and fast food. “Guys,” we are told, rush to Hardees because they can’t fix their own breakfast. Although one can see a great...
In the Introduction to Walker Percy Remembered, David Horace Harwell explains that he began his project with the idea of writing a conventional biography of Percy, one that would explore some fresh aspect of the novelist’s life. Then, as the research unfolded, he “found the form that best suits Percy.” The result is what Harwell...
“I see the imminent death of 20,000 men, / That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, / Go to their graves like beds . . . ” —Shakespeare, Hamlet This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Modern Age, the flagship journal of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, edited now for almost half...
Long ago, a British veteran of World War II offered this sober moral judgment on the war: It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the enemy was plain in...
George Garrett, Chronicles’ most distinguished contributing editor, can be relied upon, always, to tell it like it is. He is doing just that when he writes in a blurb to Reinventing the South: “[T]hese essays are splendidly written—mercifully free of contemporary critical jargon and easily accessible to the good and serious reader.” And he amplifies...
What is the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and the current struggle against the perpetrators of jihad against the West? Should the masterminds of, and participants in, the suicide bombings of September 11 and other terrorist acts be protected by the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions? In several important decisions by the U.S....
“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” —2 Timothy 1:7 “When neither their property nor honour is touched,” wrote Mach-i-avelli, “the majority of men live content.” The American people, it is safe to say, do not live content. Our property is...
We do not hear much about the Armenian genocide of 1915. Even less well known is the Turk’s expulsion of the Greeks of Western Anatolia and the Pontic coast in the years after World War I. At Smyrna, Greek and Armenian Christians were literally driven into the sea or massacred. Shockingly, nearly 20 British, French,...
The appellation “monstre sacré” for Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877-1964), was coined by François Mauriac, an influential Catholic litterateur and contemporary of Garrigou, suggesting the ill feelings harbored by those who found their theological or philosophical positions contradicted by Garrigou. In this book, Fr. Richard Peddicord, O.P., associate professor of systematic theology at the Aquinas Institute,...
“Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.” —William James In one of his rare interviews several years back, Cormac McCarthy suggested that writers who are not preoccupied with death are simply “not serious.” Chaucer might have objected, of course, not to mention...
Memory’s Keep by James Everett Kibler Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co.; 221 pp., $22.00 A first-rate scholar is as rare as, or rarer than, a first-rate creative writer. Believe me, having hung out with professors for 45 years, I know whereof I speak. When a first-rate scholar is also a creative artist of merit, you have...
Professor of history at Brown University, author of The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, The American Revolution: A History, and The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, Gordon S. Wood is in a unique position to undertake an account of those Founding Fathers from whom we must feel increasingly estranged. ...
Roger Scruton has had a long and paradoxical career as a kind of intellectual outlaw—a sage of the badlands that hem in the p.c. pale. Aesthete, philosopher, author, journalist, lecturer, broadcaster, farmer, fox hunter, even musician—he has been all of these things, an often solitary small-c conservative voice in milieux dominated by the forces of...
“The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Philip Rieff is best known for his Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966), a work that many would rank among the most significant...
I thought that Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota might be a cut above the general run of politicians when I noticed that he was one of four Democratic senators who voted against the Bush administration’s recent “immigration reform” bill, designed to replace the American population with Third World coolie labor. That prompted me to get...
A large portion of American history is only now being invented. For most periods of that history, we know the broad outlines: For instance, any account of the 1850’s has to include certain themes, certain events and landmarks. However much we differ on our interpretation, every respectable account has to devote some space to Uncle Tom’s...
Con Coughlin is the defense and security editor of London’s Daily Telegraph and the author of several books on Middle Eastern themes: Hostage, about Lebanon in the 1980’s; A Golden Basin Full of Scorpions: The Quest for Modern Jerusalem, a presentation of the city through the voices of residents; and Saddam: King of Terror, a...
This book will surely be widely denounced. Its merit, which is considerable, is suggested by the vast coalition who will want to deride it: the corporate elite, Republicans, Clinton Democrats, neoliberals, the politically correct lobby, libertarians, neocons. Any author who can provoke such an array of enemies must be onto something. Walter Benn Michaels’ argument...
The political culture of the United States is cramped and stunted by the narrow range of acceptable viewpoints and the utterly banal, subliterate tone of our political campaigns—to compare American elections to the marketing of soap is an insult to the people who sell soap. If, as Sean Scallon notes in Beating the Powers That...
“A nation scattered and peeled . . . a nation meted out and trodden down.” —Isaiah 18:2 “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.” Pat Buchanan quotes this aphorism of Charles Péguy in his latest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion...
Over the past four decades, Wendell Berry has been one of the most prolific writers in America, averaging around a book each year. Much of this output has been in the realm of poetry, for which he has been honored with the T.S. Eliot Award, the Aiken Taylor Award, the John Hay Award, and other...
June 1941 is an important and valuable book. Rather than provide the lives of Hitler and Stalin in parallel, historian John Lukacs seeks carefully to probe the dynamic of the relationship between the two men in order to illuminate a pivotal moment in world history. At this, he is brilliantly successful. Lukacs’s spare account, devoid...
Some years ago, at a seminar on Homer for mostly Greekless scholars, an eminent American conservative opined that, whatever merits there were in the civilization of ancient Greeks, no one could take their childish religion seriously. Somewhat testily, I replied that a religion that had attracted the attention of such considerable scholars as Ulrich von...
World War II has been very slow to yield up its secrets. We learned easily about the heinous misdeeds perpetrated by the Axis powers upon innocent populations, but it has been harder to expose and explain the “secrets” of our conduct toward innocent civilians and ordinary soldiers who came under our control or influence. And...
Readers of Chronicles already know that David Middleton is an extraordinarily accomplished poet. For much of the rest of the reading world, unfortunately, he is a well-kept secret. Living in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and teaching at Nicholls State University, he is far removed from the centers of literary power and influence. Even if that were not...
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” —Walt Kelly’s Pogo Some months before the invasion of Iraq, a well-known neocon stopped by my office to stump for war. It would all be very easy, he said coolly. We just needed to eliminate a handful of people in Saddam Hussein’s government, and all resistance...
Eight years ago, I sat in the home of Nashville artist Jack Kershaw, drinking whiskey from a Jefferson cup and listening to the story of the burning of Columbia, South Carolina (February 17-18, 1865). Mr. Kershaw pointed to the various scenes in his terrifying painting of the fire: In the center, a drunken Yankee plays...
This latest volume of George Garrett’s stories and sketches is proof that the old fox has not forgotten how to raid our American cultural henhouse without running away with a few plump chickens. Chronicles readers should not have to be told that Garrett, a long-time contributing editor to this magazine, is the master of several...
The conventional history of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy has traced the ascendancy of the neoconservative ideologues in his administration to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and the ensuing “War on Terror,” the invasion of Iraq, and regime-change schemes in the Middle East. The common assumption among analysts is that,...
Walter Sullivan entered Vanderbilt University in 1941 as an 18-year-old freshman. Two years later, he left during World War II to join the Marine Corps. He returned in 1946 to finish his degree in English and left again in 1947 to pursue an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with Robie Macauley...
“And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” —Revelation 13:4 Signs and omens have been everywhere this year. Amid wars and rumors of wars, one occasionally glimpses evidence that truth is now...
In Decade of Nightmares, Philip Jenkins considers how the progressive and “forward-looking” decade of free love, drugs, and cultural revolution led to the reactionary “counterrevolution” of the 1980’s, personified by Ronald Reagan. The author gives fair play to both sides of the various debates, which makes for interesting reading. It is often difficult to tell,...
Stephen Glain, a former Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, joins a long list of journalists, pundits, and think-tank analysts who have endeavored, since the World Trade Center attacks, to help America understand the Arab world. In his first (and, so far, only) book, he argues that the relationship between economics and political...
I admit to being a biased reviewer. Donkey Cons is a book about the Democratic Party, and I will say up front that I don’t much care for the Democrats. Consider a sorry, random list: Kennedy (pick one), Pelo-si, Schu-mer, Clinton (pick one), Dean, Kerry, Lieber-man. The names alone are enough to turn one’s stomach. There...
“A combination of St. Paul and St. Vitus.” —Ascribed to John Morley The world could use a few more volumes devoted to Grover Cleveland; it has little need for more books about Theodore Roosevelt. But if more there must be, at least the two under consideration here explore terrain not yet strip-mined. Patricia O’Toole begins...
Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy is divided into three parts held together, at times, only by the most tenuous of rhetorical threads. The first deals with the perilous politics of Big Oil and American imperial overreach; the third, with the looming threat to American prosperity represented by out-of-control national debt and what Phillips calls the “financialization...
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley Media commentators covering David Cameron’s incumbency as Tory leader have remarked—often gleefully—on how unpopular Cameron’s Labour-like policies are with the “traditional right.” By this, they mean the Thatcherite rump of the party (probably still the numerical...
The History Book Club has done us a good service by reprinting Leon Wolff’s Little Brown Brother, published originally in 1960, before we had learned to be politically correct or had figured out that we were building an empire. In fact, in 1960, most of us had not realized that our foreign policy had been...
Americans love their lawns. They spend $40 billion per year—more than the gross national product of most countries—to create the perfect lawn. Taken together, all these lawns would cover the entire state of Kentucky. Lawns are everywhere, from trailer parks and executive mansions to businesses, churches, and recreational areas. American agronomists have created so many...
The culture war takes many forms—or, perhaps, we should say that the war has many fronts, and that the musical conflicts arising from this war are significant ones. Thus, we are convinced, when we approach a car that delivers a pounding reverb of bass, that the driver is not only cultivating a hearing loss that...
There are innumerable topics of historical study, but an historian has, I believe, to choose among three styles of history. The first, seemingly the most popular among academics these days, concentrates on facts (i.e., physical evidence). The difficulty with this history is its avowed loathing of any interpretation of the facts by the historian; the...
“A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak and is supplanted by oligarchy.” —Aristotle The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz New York: W.W. Norton; 1,004 pp., $35.00 To write a book about democracy, a word that functions today as little more than an advertising slogan, an author should first...
The two most prominent newspaper journalists covering the U.S. Supreme Court have written biographies of two of the most prominent justices of our time. Predictably, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, who has written Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey, and Joan Biskupic of USA Today, who recently published Sandra Day O’Connor:...