Category: Reviews

This gathering of essays, studies, reviews, and occasional pieces is united by its subject and fused by the imagination and knowledge of the author.  Clyde Wilson has responded not only to a host of opportunities as a professional historian and scholar but to sundry provocations as a lively contemporary who knows the implications of ideological...

In America today, nearly every month brings a new occasion to renew the Culture War over religion in the public square.  By next year, our sensitive multicultural elites might insist on celebrating “Hearts and Flowers Day” on February 14 and “Drink Beer and Wear Green Day” on March 17. Americans have not always been such...

From before the time of Homer until the middle of the 19th century, almost all poets in the Western literary tradition wrote measured verse—that is, poems with a regular repeated rhythmical pattern.  Then, in a little over a hundred years, from Walt Whitman through the 1960’s, a new form of writing (free verse) fully emerged...

“Disguise the fact as you will, there is an enmity between the Northern and Southern people that is deep and enduring, and you never can eradicate it—never!” —Alfred Iverson Many Chronicles readers are probably already familiar with Reg-nery’s Politically Incorrect Guides (P.I.G.) series, two of which have achieved best-seller status in recent years.  Currently, there...

This handsome book, with its dust-jacket reproduction of Hughson Hawley’s Laying the Tracks at Broadway and 14th Street (ca. 1891), is unique in American anthology-making.  While it has long been acknowledged that Irish American fiction and drama constitute what Charles Fanning called, in The Irish Voice in America, “a distinctive and complex literary heritage,” Irish...

Hours—or, rather, weeks—spent with the 2006-07 NCAA football bowls may suggest something wrong not only with the priorities of higher education but with the imperial rituals of the nation.  There are a lot of cheerleaders and fight songs and marching bands and rowdy fans and excruciatingly bad renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and excellent tailgate...

There is an English expression without an equivalent in my language.  (It isn’t every day that one hears a Russian obscurantist admitting such a thing, and, for once, I beg the incredulous reader to rein in his disbelief.)  The expression is a labor of love, a combination of words in itself precise and profound enough...

When I contacted Transaction to request a review copy of the paperback edition of The Strange Death of Moral Britain (the hardback appeared in 2004), I was told I would have to wait for a few weeks, because they were completely out of stock of the first print run.  Perhaps this book has struck a...

Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893, into a stable world of which Europe was the center and where America was poised to attain hemispheric dominance.  That world’s certainties were shattered in the trenches of Northern France, but the shock was less profound among America’s northeastern aristocracy—to which Acheson belonged...

It is not impossible, merely difficult, for the author of a highly praised first novel to produce a second worthy of its predecessor.  Perhaps paucity of imagination is responsible for the failure of many second novels; the writer emptied his quiver the first time or got lucky with a flash-in-the-pan and should not have tried...

“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...

Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird has sold over 30 million copies since its publication in 1960.  Hardly a high-school student in America over the last 40 years has graduated without having read the 1930’s-era drama of a small-town Southern lawyer who defends an innocent black man accused of rape by a white woman. ...

“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...

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:...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...