I have read no Jane Austen since high school, when no doubt a boyish prejudice prevented me from fully appreciating or understanding what I was reading, but I return to her now with – one hopes –greater maturity and appreciation. […]
William Giraldi’s American Audacity
by on July 31, 2020
Given that I am reviewing a collection of essays entitled American Audacity, let me begin by being audacious: there are perhaps two or three English-language critics alive today who are the equal of William Giraldi – in judgment, depth of […]
Kenneth Minogue’s On Liberty And Its Enemies
by on July 26, 2020
Nowhere have I found a more perspicacious diagnosis of our modern malaise than in the writings of Kenneth Minogue, a New Zealand-born political philosopher who spent more than a decade of his life teaching at the London School of Economics. […]
Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man
by on July 21, 2020
Are we reliving the 1930s? Many commentators, not all of them hysterical, would have us believe so. The catastrophe of the COVID-19 epidemic has brought the global economy to a standstill, and the scramble for vital drugs and medical supplies […]
Edward Dahlberg’s Because I Was Flesh
by on July 16, 2020
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the most stirring and original memoir I have ever read is also the strangest. Surprisingly, it is not really a memoir at all, despite purporting to be the “autobiography” of its author, Edward Dahlberg. It is instead a […]
David Gelernter’s America-Lite
by on July 7, 2020
David Gelernter came to my attention in 2016, when he authored a provocative Wall Street Journal column on “Trump and the Emasculated Voter,” endorsing the former reality television star’s unlikely (and ultimately successful) bid for the Oval Office. The column […]
E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate
by on June 30, 2020
I don’t recall the last time a novel so instantaneously grabbed me, from the opening page, and held me in captivated, rapturous awe for 300 pages. E.L. Doctorow, who passed away in 2015, wrote Billy Bathgate in 1989, but it […]
Stephen Spender’s World Within World
by on June 28, 2020
Prior to picking up his only memoir, World Within World, I had little prior exposure to Stephen Spender. I knew him to be a poet, probably from some anthology I read as a teenager, but could not have named even […]
James Q. Wilson’s Thinking About Crime
by on June 26, 2020
I ordered Thinking About Crime, a once-influential assemblage of the writings of famed political scientist James Q. Wilson, before the brutal killing of an unarmed, restrained black man by a white police officer toppled COVID-19 from atop its pillar in […]
Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy Of A Nightmare
by on June 18, 2020
I recently came across an article published in a scientific journal nearly a decade ago that warned that the 2020s, in the United States, might be a time of revolutionary fervor. The article purported to analyze the factors that made […]