“A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” —Mark 4:4 A half-dozen biographical essays or theses have now been written on George Kennan, including John Lukacs’s recent and compelling George Kennan: A Study of Character (2007). This latest endeavor, by Lee Congdon, is...
One of the less appreciated perils of literary fame is the risk a writer runs every hundred years as the anniversary of his birthday approaches. This year marks the 200th birthday not only of Darwin but of Lincoln, a completely irrelevant coincidence that inspired Smithsonian—the trivializing newsletter of “the nation’s attic”—to celebrate the two men...
Barack Obama has risen to the highest office in the land on a thin résumé—a pair of Ivy League degrees, some time spent as a “community organizer,” and short periods in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate. And then there are the books. The President is the author of the best-selling Audacity of Hope...
“For me,” wrote P.D. James in her “fragment of autobiography,” Time To Be in Earnest, “one of the fascinations of detective fiction is the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of murder inquiry.” Murder “is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim.” As a writer...
“The lives, not only of men, but of commonwealths and the whole world, run not upon a helix that still enlargeth; but on a circle where, arriving at their meridian, they decline in obscurity, and fall under the horizon again.” —Thomas Browne, Religio Medici I There are few books I have read in recent...
If man is the measure, it cannot be right to tell him what to do. We cannot be forced to be free or ordered to be equal. Neither theoretical refinements nor practical compromises can resolve such basic contradictions or keep them from leading to unprincipled and irrational conduct that eventually proves self-destructive. Savor that felicitous...
Ask any trendy student of history today and he will tell you that, without question, the cause of the great American bloodletting of 1861–65 was slavery. Slavery and nothing but slavery. The unstated and usually unconscious assumption is that only people warped by a vicious institution could possibly fight against being part of “the greatest...
This volume has provoked in this correspondent a number of Yogi Berra moments—it’s been déjà vu all over again, and for more than one reason. Why, then, am I seized with such a pleasant vertigo? Let me count the ways! First off, I have lived with this material before some of it even happened, for...
Charles Glass, who lives in London, is an old friend of mine. He is, moreover, a member of White’s; a witty conversationalist; an American with impeccable manners; immaculate, if slightly Brooks Brothers conservative, in his dress; and almost universally liked. Hence the fact that he has published, to near unanimous critical acclaim in Britain, a...
“I am told thee has been dancing with the queen. I do hope, my son, thee will not marry out of meeting.” —American Quaker mother in a letter to her son following the Coronation Ball in 1838 Here are three very excellent books, two on the subject of America, the third substantially so. One of the...
“All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.” —Karl Marx After the Last Man is a short and dense book, consisting of a series of vignettes (excursus) ranging from a paragraph to a few pages in length on the contemporary technological system. Each excursus is...
One should begin a review with a summation of a book and then of its author. The reverse is warranted in this case. James Grant is an extraordinary American, a financial expert whose mind is enriched by his knowledge of history. His previous book was an excellent biography of John Adams. It did not receive...
The chronological niche which the generation of D.J. Taylor’s title occupies, 1918-40, will be remembered by future historians—if, indeed, there should be any such creatures among the oafish homunculi now incubating in the totalitarian crucibles of modern life—for sheltering the end product of the West’s millennial evolution. Good or bad, foolish or clever, talented or...
“Trust no one.” The landmark TV series The X-Files used that catchphrase in depicting a world riven with conspiracies that reach to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agents who attempted to unravel these grand conspiracies, make the occasional appearance in Kathryn Olmsted’s Real Enemies. Man...
“The oldest sins the newest kind of ways . . . ” —William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 Kingsley Amis called him “Grim Grin,” an apt name for a novelist who aggressively insisted that the path to God runs through the wilderness of lust, degradation, deceit, and betrayal. Like his spiritual ancestor, Nathaniel Hawthorne,...
Robert Gildea, professor of modern history at Oxford, is the author of some half-dozen volumes dealing with France after 1800 or, in one case, Europe as a whole. Most are broad studies or learned surveys (the terms are not intended as pejorative), very detailed, usually concentrating on one or more aspects of the picture. One...
Fr. James Pereiro’s new history of the Victorian Church examines a much-neglected element of the Oxford Movement’s central tenets. Ethos, he contends, was the key component in the development of a complex theory of knowledge that Tractarians—named after the movement’s “Tracts for the Times”—would adopt as their own. The idea was conceived by Anglican priest...
When news of Lepanto arrived in Rome, the Pope exclaimed, “Now Lord, you can take your servant, for my eyes have seen your salvation.” The battle’s outcome gratified the pontiff, but it may not have surprised him. Legend holds that, at the moment the Turkish admiral was slain on his quarterdeck, Pius V had sensed,...
“[T]he most heroic sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas will drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications.” —Samuel Johnson In January 2005, one of the premier scholarly publishers in the English language, Princeton...
In his essay on “self-reliance,” Emerson wrote that “travelling is a fool’s paradise.” He was referring to those who travel to escape the boredom or sadness of their lives, and who hope to return home somehow transformed. Yet we may add those who travel to boast (“Look, here I am at the Parthenon!” or “I...
Seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) believed that God moderates reason. That is to say, faith prevents man from falling deeply into error. Yet the writing of this brilliant man of faith—in particular, his Discourse on Method (1637)—has encouraged a separation of faith and reason that has tended to divide human beings from the very...
The first two sentences of this fine book tell it all. “This is a text for our times. It is a celebration of diplomacy and diplomats—of an essentially extinct profession.” I shall return to this summa summarum; but first, here is my account of the contents of this book. It consists of five substantial portraits...
“I have found little ‘good’ about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.” —Sigmund Freud An old professor of mine once joked that ecumenism was a case of “the bland leading the bland,” an epithet that could just as appropriately describe contemporary humanism. Cast your net at Google, and you will haul...
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
“Courts of justice cautiously abstain from deciding more than what the immediate point submitted to their consideration requires.” —Mr. Justice Nicholl In what was probably the most laudable achievement of his administration, President George W. Bush placed on the Supreme Court two justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who believe...
“Should one have lived, only to read the twenty-third song of the Iliad, he could not lament of his existence,” commented G.E. Lessing. Of course, in Lessing’s day, many of the literati could have read the Iliad in Greek. Today, the typical reader experiences the Iliad in translation, and he has over 100 translations to...
Years ago, when a Vanderbilt graduate-school party was careening toward promiscuity, a quiet young woman, an English major, suddenly shocked everyone by saying, “Tell you what let’s do: Let’s all name the books we’ve never read.” Suddenly it was time to go home. In five minutes the room was empty, except for the host and...
Before Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church appeared to be a fortress against the raging tide of modernity, a supremely self-confident institution that attracted converts of the caliber of Evelyn Waugh, G.K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, and Christopher Dawson. After Vatican II, the Church’s attitude toward modernity changed, vocations dried up, and entire countries came close...
The search for and, when it cannot be found, the construction of a usable past remains the overriding task of our official historians, who believe that we are forever on the cusp of a new age. The opposite could be said of Thucydides, who sought “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to...
“The Republic is nothing, a mere name without form or substance,” Julius Caesar allegedly stated. The sentiment, certainly, was validated by the end of Caesar’s life, which marked the transition from an imperial republic to an empire eclipsing republican institutions. So bloody and tumultuous was this period, it is unsurprising that estimations of Caesar vary....
“All great peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in custom once solemnly established, and now long recognized as just and final.” —Thomas Carlyle Both Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative...
The long-suffering and largely ignored paleoconservatives might be forgiven for taking some satisfaction in the recent bursting of so many bubbles of avarice and pride, the sudden exposure of so many highly leveraged speculations in stupidity. Let us recount some of the failed millennial assertions by the ruling party: that history has come to an...
When Tibbie came into my life, I was already past my 40th year. After a few weeks I marveled how I had ever lived without a dog. As a first dog, this 14-pound West Highland terrier would set the standard for those to follow—kindhearted, gentle, loving, spirited, playful, patient, trusting, intelligent, obedient, mischievous, a beauty...
“Arrogance and boldness belong to those that are accursed of God.” —Saint Clement of Rome After the end of the Cold War, reasonable people might have expected the United States to withdraw from her many foreign commitments and become a normal country again. Yet the opposite has happened. Rather than dissolve, NATO has expanded. Instead...
John G. West is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a nonpartisan public-policy think tank that conducts research on technology, science and culture, economics, and foreign affairs. The Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is notable for challenging various aspects of evolutionary theory—maintaining, for instance, that evolutionary biology has failed to answer many salient...
Peter Green is one of the rarest birds in the academic chicken coop, a popular historian who combines careful scholarship and original opinions into a coherent account that respects its sources and yet attempts to go beyond them. In a long career he has achieved considerable renown for such varied books as a translation of...
The Western setting of this closely focused narrative is a confirmation of the author’s identification with a region, as we know from his Western novels Desert Light and The Homestead and other nonfictional books relating to the West and to the border with Mexico. The text itself, however, insists that this Western setting is more...
“If I were God and had two sons, the eldest would have to be God after me, but I’d make the second King of France.” —Ascribed to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor The subtitle of this handsome illustrated volume, “A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War,” usefully indicates the book’s historical dimension,...
Many news stories from the first half of 2008 read like a page out of the Book of Revelation. Rising grain prices were already leading to food riots in developing countries when a one-two punch, in the form of Cyclone Nargis and a series of tornadoes and floods, devastated the rice crop in Burma and...
This book would have been better entitled “A Time to Think.” It contains some good thinking but not much fight. Doubtless the author and publisher knew that Fighting is a better sell than Thinking. Barack Obama will have chosen his running mate by the time this review reaches readers. At the time of writing there...
“My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement . . . ” —George Washington “It’s not you, it’s me” has become a popular phrase with which to terminate a romantic relationship. It is considered a more polite...
In “The Shadow Players,” one of 12 stories in Anthony Bukoski’s most recent collection, Lance Corporal Pete Dziedzic returns to his childhood home in Superior, Wisconsin, after a four-year tour of duty in Vietnam. The year is 1967. Physically unscathed by the war, he finds himself adrift. His old girlfriend, tired of waiting for him,...
G.K. Chesterton’s writings are as prescient today as they were over three quarters of a century ago. When he wrote most of the essays in this anthology during the early 20th century, he was either warning Great Britain about the impending dangers of war or offering advice on how to create a state of peace. ...
“The law is good, if a man use it lawfully.” —1 Timothy 1:8 Richard Posner is one of the greatest judges never to have sat on the Supreme Court of the United States. A distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit for 25...
In May 2003, Christian Wiman was named the new editor of Poetry, the Chicago-based magazine that Harriet Monroe founded and made justly famous. This appointment came a year after Ruth Lilly made a massive gift to the magazine that brought its endowment to nearly $200 million and attracted enormous media attention. Wiman, born in 1966,...
World War II cast an enormous cultural shadow over American life. It provided a backdrop for novels, television shows, and—especially—movies. Like many boys who grew up in the decades after the war, I read about the conflict, traced my fingers across maps illustrating the U.S. island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, watched and rewatched war movies,...
The late Mark Winchell’s recently published Robert Penn Warren: Genius Loves Company is a collection of essays focusing on Warren’s close associations and literary affinities. Warren was known as a kind and generous man who encouraged other writers in their work, helped those in need, and nurtured fragile friendships over a lifetime, sometimes with people...
The indifference of Catholic elected officials to Church teachings is so common that it rarely attracts attention, but there are occasional exceptions. When at least five fervently pro-abortion politicians took Communion at papal Masses this April, from the hands of the Pope’s representative to the United States, even the New York Times and the Washington...
Augustin Cochin (1876-1916), a French historian little known today, sought to provide a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of the French Revolution with an eye to discovering the reasons for the terror and butchery that arose in its course. The nature and depth of his motivations and concerns can be gleaned from his judgment that...
“He saith among the trumpets, Ha, Ha! and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.” —Job 29:25 According to the fashion current in the publishing world today, the title of a book is a bit of catchy fluff, and the subtitle a ponderous, plonking sentence fragment indicating the...