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The Sufferings of a Sculptor
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The Sufferings of a Sculptor

SIN (IL PECCATO) Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky ◆ Written by Andrei Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva ◆ Produced by Alisher Usmanov ◆ Distributed by Corinth Films Despite its potentially salacious title, Sin (Il peccato) is thankfully not another sordid tale about an artistic genius lured into fleshly temptations, having a crisis of faith, or battling with...

Books in Brief: October 2021
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Books in Brief: October 2021

Homo Americanus, by Zbigniew Janowski (St. Augustine’s Press; 250 pp., $24.00). Polish American political thinker Zbigniew Janowski examines the reasons that modern American democracy has taken a totalitarian turn. Contrary to the happy talk coming from establishment conservatives about the need to spread America’s so-called liberal democratic values everywhere, Janowski paints a dark but compelling...

What We Are Reading: October 2021
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What We Are Reading: October 2021

Although H. L. Mencken could discern “no plot whatever” in Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, he still praised the novel as “a social document of a high order.” The 1922 classic mordantly sketches a bygone America and the paladins who made it run. Even today, the title character’s surname still mocks guileless Americans who conform unthinkingly to...

The Deplorables’ Academics
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The Deplorables’ Academics

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life   by Jordan B. Peterson  Portfolio  432 pp., Hardcover $29.00   The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense   by Gad Saad  Regnery Publishing  235 pp., $28.99   Walmart is for deplorables, the  left tells us. If that is so, then Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad must...

The Alienation of Henry Adams
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The Alienation of Henry Adams

The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams by Davis S. Brown  Scribner  464 pp., $30.00   Henry Adams (1838-1918) was born in the waning years of the early Republic. As he entered into adulthood after the Civil War, the country he saw emerging did not please him. The new...

Faith and Country Weighed in the Balance
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Faith and Country Weighed in the Balance

American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War by D. G. Hart  Cornell University Press  280 pp., $29.95   “What the hell is an encyclical?” is probably the most honest and articulate response ever uttered by a Catholic politician in the United States. It was mouthed by New York’s first Catholic governor, Al...

Revisiting the Round Table
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Revisiting the Round Table

The Green Knight Directed and written by David Lowery ◆ Produced by Ley Line Entertainment ◆ Distributed by A24   In a world where chivalry is an alleged tool of the patriarchy, it seems odd that the story of the Green Knight, one of the most famous tales of the Arthurian legend, remains popular today....

The Soft Revolution
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The Soft Revolution

Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher Sentinel-Penguin Books 256 pp., $14.69 Rod Dreher is not the first to argue that America, and much of the West, has undergone a radical transformation in the post-World War II era. More specifically, we are moving at an ever-accelerating pace toward “soft totalitarianism,”...

The Declaration and Its Iconoclasts
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The Declaration and Its Iconoclasts

The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1995) by Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey Catholic University of America Press 168 pp., $19.95 Ask the average American what  his country stands for and he will likely answer “equality.” If that person studied a bit of American history, he or she would then cite the...

Dynastic Nostalgia
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Dynastic Nostalgia

The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War by Luke A. Nichter Yale University Press 544 pp., $37.50 Even before the Kennedys took center stage in American mythology, Americans have had their share of legendary families, the decline and fall of which have been staples of both history and...

The Strongmen Straw Man
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The Strongmen Straw Man

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum Doubleday 224 pp., $25.00 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat W. W. Norton & Company 384 pp., $28.95 For some among the chattering classes, the electoral defeat of Donald Trump in November must have been a mixed blessing, though they doubtless could...

What We Are Reading: September 2021
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What We Are Reading: September 2021

Northwestern Europe’s early development owes much to the Carolingian dynasty, which led Germanic society into Christendom from the dead end of paganism. It set the stage for the lush flowering of knightly culture, with its ideals of chivalry, courtesy, and courtly love, which established the Western habit of mind. This Western ethos is rooted in...

The Troubled Waves of Stillwater
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The Troubled Waves of Stillwater

Stillwater Written and directed by Tom McCarthy ◆ Produced by PGA ◆ Distributed by Focus Features   Body and Soul (1947) Directed by Robert Rossen ◆ Screenplay by Abraham Polonsky ◆ Produced by Enterprise Productions ◆ Distributed by United Artists   A good example of what not to  do when using a real-life story as...

Books in Brief: September 2021
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Books in Brief: September 2021

Homeland Elegies: A Novel, by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown & Co.; 368 pp., $28.00). Mark Twain wrote in his 1897 travel book, Following the Equator: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” That saying came in handy as I read this book, described on...

Books in Brief: August 2021
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Books in Brief: August 2021

Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, by Ellen Vaughn (B&H Books; 320 pp., $24.99). This is the official biography of the wife of famed missionary martyr Jim Elliot, who was killed along with four other missionaries while attempting to bring the Gospel to a group of savage natives in the South American jungle during the mid-1950s. Elliot was...

An Unlikely Beauty
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An Unlikely Beauty

Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce New York: Dial Press 368 pp., $18.00 Why read fiction? It’s life without consequences. Reading Miss Benson’s Beetle, a novel of manners that successfully mixes satire, farce, adventure, and mystery, reminds one of the value of imaginative literature. Most of the action takes place after World War II, while...

Monumental Follies
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Monumental Follies

Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History by Alexander Adams Societas 180 pp., $29.90 The ill-starred year of COVID saw another, more localized, virus—an outbreak of attacks on public monuments in several countries, particularly in the United States and Britain. While this sickness presents itself as a skin-disease, only scarring symbols, its virulency attests...

What We Are Reading: August 2021
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What We Are Reading: August 2021

“After the quiet 1950s…incidents of political violence again became more frequent and now we may be in the middle of another wave of sociopolitical instability.” Thus five years ago wrote Peter Turchin, a University of Connecticut professor specializing in “historical social science,” a.k.a. Cliodynamics. After 2020’s violent nationwide political protests and the pandemic’s destruction of...

The Christian Roots of WEIRDness
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The Christian Roots of WEIRDness

The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich Picador 704 pp., $24.00 Christianity has blessed us with essential elements of the Western world that we should want to preserve, even while it has also produced corrosive pieces of our current cultural predicament. The bizarre political quasi-religion of antiracist wokeism, with its ressentiment-driven obsession with...

Books in Brief: July 2021
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Books in Brief: July 2021

Who Is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations, by Thomas Achord and Darrell Dow (584 pp., $24.99). The headmaster of a classical Christian school has teamed up with a statistician to collect and sort thousands of quotations pertaining to human relationships from myriad religious, political, and historic figures. The result is an invaluable reference for patriots...

Faulknerian Presentism
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Faulknerian Presentism

The Life of William Faulkner. Volume 1: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897–1934 512 pp., $34.95 The Life of William Faulkner. Volume 2: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 656 pp., $34.95 by Carl Rollyson University of Virginia Press Readers might be excused for exclaiming, “What! Another Faulkner biography?” Yet one can make a case for a...

The White-Guilt Grifters
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The White-Guilt Grifters

The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto by Charles Blow Harper Collins 256 pp., $26.99 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Random House 496 pp., $32.00 The verbal tics of the orthodox Marxist vocabulary in mid-20th century Europe made it virtually impossible for communists to camouflage themselves. Ex-communist author Arthur Koestler...

What We Are Reading: July 2021
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What We Are Reading: July 2021

This extraordinary tome proposes a cure for our cultural illness: the resurgence of the muscular Christianity that once permeated higher education. The success of Fulton Brown’s project is far from assured, but in this essay collection she embraces the task with zealous ecstasy. The book is ostensibly the story of the author’s unlikely relationship with...

Manifesto of a Paleo Fellow Traveller
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Manifesto of a Paleo Fellow Traveller

The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return by Michael Anton Regnery Publishing 500 pp., $32.99 Michael Anton attracted widespread public notice in Sept. 2016 as the author of a pseudonymous article in the Claremont Review called “The Flight 93 Election.” It became one of the most widely debated and disseminated articles of the...

Books in Brief: June 2021
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Books in Brief: June 2021

Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality, by Nancy Leong (Stanford University Press; 240 pp., $28.00). Nancy Leong recounts her chagrin at a friend’s wedding to start her jaundiced polemic, Identity Capitalists. The tipsy bride, gushing with thanks for Leong’s attendance, hugged her before joking indelicately, “I mean if you hadn’t...

What We Are Reading: June 2021
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What We Are Reading: June 2021

Marriage and divorce. Is there any topic on which it is easier to find self-professed conservatives who somehow cannot bring themselves even to seriously contemplate the truly conservative position than this one? Louis de Bonald’s On Divorce remains, more than 200 years after its first publication, the most profound and philosophically sound argument for the...

The Strange Case of Dr. Dickens  and Mr. Drood
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The Strange Case of Dr. Dickens and Mr. Drood

The Mystery of Charles Dickens By A. N. Wilson Harper Collins 319 pp., $32.50 It’s no secret that Charles Dickens was in an unhappy marriage to his wife, Catherine, and that the great author was verbally and emotionally abusive to her. In his 1939 essay, “Dickens: The Two Scrooges,” Edmund Wilson tries to mitigate this...

The Unfashionable Adams Legacy
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The Unfashionable Adams Legacy

The Education of John Adams; by R. B. Bernstein; Oxford University Press; 368 pp., $24.95 It is not fashionable these days to admire the Founding Fathers, and yet the flood of books, articles, and even Broadway musicals devoted to them has not ceased. Attention is usually focused on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jeff erson,...

Days of Rage
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Days of Rage

The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working- Class Revolution; By David Paul Kuhn; Oxford University Press; Hardcover, 416 pp., $29.95 Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest; By Lawrence Roberts; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Hardcover,...

What the Editors Are Reading: The Zone of Interest
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What the Editors Are Reading: The Zone of Interest

The novelist Martin Amis is the son of Kingsley Amis, whose Lucky Jim (1954) was a spectacular success. Noting the father’s “brilliance and ‘facile bravura,’” Atlantic critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft asserted that Martin “misunderstood his hereditary gifts when he turned from playful comedy to ‘the great issues of our time.’” Among his “great issues” is that of Nazi concentration camps,...

Grappling With Armageddon
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Grappling With Armageddon

The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War; by Fred Kaplan; Simon & Schuster; 384 pp., $18.00 In 1958, former RAF officer Peter George (under the pseudonym Peter Bryant) wrote Red Alert, a novel about a communication accident that almost triggers a nuclear war. In a series of short, increasingly tense, time-stamped chapters,...

Laughing at the Hereafter
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Laughing at the Hereafter

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife; by Bart D. Ehrman; Simon & Schuster; 352 pp., $28.00 Were popular success an index of scholarly mastery, Broadway musical composer Andrew Lloyd Webber would be recognized as a world authority on Christology. He is not, but Bart D. Ehrman is, and his presumptive expertise in the...

Books in Brief: April/May 2021
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Books in Brief: April/May 2021

The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, by William Deresiewicz (Henry Holt; 368 pp., $27.99). Members of a book club at my highly selective undergraduate business school were stung by William Deresiewicz’s portrait of careerist, grade-grubbing college students in his scathing 2015 book,...

What the Editors Are Reading: April/May 2021
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What the Editors Are Reading: April/May 2021

The novelist Martin Amis is the son of Kingsley Amis, whose Lucky Jim (1954) was a spectacular success. Noting the father’s “brilliance and ‘facile bravura,’” Atlantic critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft asserted that Martin “misunderstood his hereditary gifts when he turned from playful comedy to ‘the great issues of our time.’” Among his “great issues” is that...

Historians Are Either Hedgehogs or Foxes
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Historians Are Either Hedgehogs or Foxes

Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades; by Bernard Bailyn; New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020; 288 pp., $28.95 Great historians must be first or primarily expert storytellers, insists historian Bernard Bailyn in his latest book. But the Pulitzer Prize winning author also declares that historians must be social scientists as well. Yet, if greatness...

What the Editors Are Reading: March 2021
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What the Editors Are Reading: March 2021

Someone’s head must have rolled at the Aspen Institute when Anand Giridharadas’ book came out. Giridharadas didn’t miss a rung as he climbed the American establishment’s social ladder: born in Shaker Heights, schooled at Sidwell Friends, the University of Michigan, and Harvard, employed at McKinsey, the International Herald Tribune, and The New York Times, and...

Books in Brief: March 2021
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Books in Brief: March 2021

America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that...

Haunts of Hobbits
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Haunts of Hobbits

The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth; by John Garth; Princeton University Press; 208 pp., $29.95 Authors have always imagined alternate universes, but in the bulging gazetteer of authorial Erewhons—from the transient town of Abaton via Atlantis, Earthsea, and Hogwarts, to Zyundal in the Isles of Wisdom—none attract such obsessive attention as Tolkien’s...

Transitional Failures
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Transitional Failures

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters; by Abigail Shrier; Regnery Publishing; 276 pp., $28.99 You’ve seen the yard signs. “We believe…Black Lives Matter; No Human is Illegal; Love is Love…” The tone is pure emotive posturing, until you get to this statement: “Science is real.” This is the foundational rhetorical trick of the contemporary...

The Life of the Mind
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The Life of the Mind

Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life; by Zena Hitz; Princeton University Press; 240 pp., $22.95 “What do I need to know for the test?” This common refrain, repeated endlessly by high school and undergraduate students, sums up one of the great heresies of our age: the view that learning is a...

What the Editors Are Reading: February 2021
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What the Editors Are Reading: February 2021

In 1989, Japanese businessman Minoru Isutani purchased Pebble Beach’s famous golf course for $850 million, and Mitsubishi Estate Company paid $846 million for 51 percent of New York’s Rockefeller Center. The United States cowered from the kamikaze attack of Japanese capital on American business. American students swamped Japanese language programs, as the Land of the Rising...

Dilution of Heroes
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Dilution of Heroes

Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History; By Patrice Gueniffey; Belknap Press; 416 pp., $35.00   Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle rose in a time of turmoil and war to restore order. Napoleon’s service to France lay in ending revolutionary violence, while de Gaulle led free France in the struggle to overcome Nazi dominated Europe. The demerits...

Books in Brief: February 2021
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Books in Brief: February 2021

Catholic & Identitarian, by Julien Langella (Arktos Media; 338 pp., $38.95). French commando Dominique Venner committed suicide inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2013 as an act of protest against unrestricted Islamic immigration. One cannot but censure Venner’s sacrilegious act. Yet, calling attention to the existential threat to the West in general and France in particular is...

Middle American Aviatrix
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Middle American Aviatrix

Taking Flight: The Nadine Ramsey Story; by Raquel Ramsey and Tricia Aurand; University Press of Kansas, 2020; 312 pp., $29.95   Taking Flight tells the remarkable tale of a courageous woman, Nadine Ramsey, who survived a difficult childhood to become Kansas’ first female commercial pilot, a World War II WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilot), an instructor of male fighter...

The Court’s Own Critic
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The Court’s Own Critic

The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law; By Antonin Scalia; Edited by Jeffrey S. Sutton and Edward Whelan; Foreword by Justice Elena Kagan; Crown Forum; 368 pp., $35.00   Steven Calabresi, one of the founders of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, maintains that Antonin Scalia was the greatest justice ever...

Books in Brief: January 2021
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Books in Brief: January 2021

The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land, by Steve Tibble (Yale University Press; 376 pp., $35.00). If one gets his Crusades history from Karen Armstrong or the History Channel, one is likely to think that nasty and brutish Franks went off half-cocked to the Holy Land to rape, pillage, and enslave peaceful Muslims. This is an ignorant...

Union Without Unity
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Union Without Unity

Break It Up; by Richard Kreitner; Little, Brown and Company; 497 pp., $30.00 Stamped on the United States’ three-dollar Continental bill in 1783 was the phrase, “The Outcome Is in Doubt.” A more appropriate phrase for our own time could hardly be found. It also serves as the subtext of journalist Richard Kreitner’s fascinating new book, which chronicles the...

The French Soul, in Stone
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The French Soul, in Stone

Notre-Dame: The Soul of France; by Agnès Poirier; One World Publications; 256 pp., $26.95 Kneeling in public remains rare in France. Even though Muslim crowds in the banlieues (suburbs) have recently taken to praying in the streets, religious display still shocks the country’s secular ethos, which prefers to severely confine religion to the private sphere.  So, when a motley lot of...

What the Editors Are Reading: January 2021
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What the Editors Are Reading: January 2021

First the crazies tore down statues they deemed offensive. Next they vandalized churches. Then they demanded trigger warnings on classic movies like Gone with the Wind and Blazing Saddles. If these monsters ever discover libraries, books will be next. Let me suggest you hoard copies of William McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) before...

The Sepulcher as Political Symbol
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The Sepulcher as Political Symbol

Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy; by Guy P. Raffa; Harvard University Press; 384 pp., $35.00 The bones and dust of the Roman poet Virgil were jealously guarded by the people of Naples. In the Middle Ages they refused the request of an English scholar to allow the poet’s bones and dust to leave their resting place. The...