Literature

Blog

July 19, 2021

Books in Brief: The One Certain Thing

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Peter Cooley's latest collection of poetry is a moving testimony to a husband's love for his wife and grief at her death.
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Blog

July 15, 2021

Books in Brief: Who Is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations

By Jerry D. Salyer

An anthology of historical quotes regarding immigration demonstrates that many sentiments decried by the 21st century west were taken for granted in all nations across history until now.
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Blog

July 14, 2021

What We Are Reading: No Country for Old Men

By Alexander Riley

Students familiar with the movie may not think so, but the original novel No Country for Old Men is a deeply political novel with a right-wing take on American society.
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Blog

July 9, 2021

What We Are Reading: Milo Chronicles

By Stephen B. Presser

Rachel Fulton Brown took Milo Yiannopoulos seriously when no one else did, and her book on her friendship with the provocateur serves as a manual for isolated conservative academics.
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Blog

July 7, 2021

Jules Verne and the Loss of American Heroism

By Anders Koskinen

In the 21st century we venerate bureaucrats and technologists who never stray too far from the comfort of their air-conditioned desks. These make for lousy heroes.
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Editorials

July 2021

A Matter of Trust

By Edward Welsch

Americans are asked to “trust the science” and ignore the latest fabrications by the country’s top health bureaucrat, Anthony Fauci. Double standards are now endemic, and there is no trust left between the factions of America’s divided society.
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Blog

June 23, 2021

What We Are Reading: Scaramouche

By Catharine Savage Brosman

The author of Scaramouche provides a refreshing service by not performing a sociologist’s dissection of class antagonisms, nor telling readers what to think.
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Reviews

July 2021

Faulknerian Presentism

By Catharine Savage Brosman

A new two-volume biography provides a fresh examination of William Faulkner that shows the Nobel laureate as a knot of contradictions, a loyal man of the South and yet one who felt “left out” and conveyed “black rebukes to white power.”
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Reviews

July 2021

What We Are Reading: July 2021

By Stephen B. Presser, Alexander Riley

Chronicles Legal Affairs Editor Stephen B. Presser reads Rachel Fulton Brown’s Milo Chronicles, and Alexander Riley reads Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.
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Reviews

July 2021

Books in Brief: July 2021

By Catharine Savage Brosman, Jerry D. Salyer

Reviews of Who Is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations, and The One Certain Thing, a poetry collection by Peter Cooley.
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Blog

June 10, 2021

What We Are Reading: On Divorce

By Alexander Riley

Louis de Bonald’s On Divorce remains, more than 200 years after its first publication, the most profound and philosophically sound argument for the indissolubility of marriage yet produced.
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Remembering the Right

June 2021

Remembering Allen Tate: Radical Conservative

By Catharine Savage Brosman

The Southern Agrarian poet Allen Tate held a conservative philosophy that entailed returning, in the face of destructive social practices, to fundamental truths. He espoused the primacy of families, organic communities, and attachment to the soil.
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Reviews

June 2021

What We Are Reading: June 2021

By Catharine Savage Brosman, Alexander Riley

Chronicles contributors review classic books: Louis de Bonald’s On Divorce (1801) and Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche (1921).
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Society & Culture

June 2021

Darwin in the Dock

By Ian Dowbiggin

Charles Darwin’s politically incorrect views on race, sex, and class may get him canceled.
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Reviews

June 2021

The Unfashionable Adams Legacy

By Stephen B. Presser

John Adams was the most intellectual of the Founding Fathers and yet is the least fashionable today. A new biography by R. B. Bernstein shows that Adams’ personal flaws and lack of finesse pale in comparison to his rich legacy of constitutional law.
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Reviews

June 2021

Days of Rage

By Timothy D. Lusch

The Jan. 6 Capitol protests were an unprecedented insurrection, we are told. Any knowledge of modern American history refutes this notion, such as that provided by two recent books on the “Hardhat Riot” of 1970 and the “Mayday Riot” of 1971.
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Reviews

June 2021

The Strange Case of Dr. Dickens and Mr. Drood

By John O'Neill

The dual nature of Charles Dickens’ personality, which could be filled with generosity toward the downtrodden and yet tremendously cruel to his own wife, is explored in a new biography by A. N. Wilson.
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Reviews

June 2021

Books in Brief: June 2021

By Piers Shepherd, John Greenville

Chronicles contributors review Nancy Leong’s Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality and Paul Embery’s Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class.
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Columns

June 2021

Me and Macho ‘Papa’

By Taki Theodoracopulos

Ernest Hemingway embodies a masculine kind of writer now out of favor: patriotic, courageous, and beautiful, spartan American prose. I first spotted the man known as ‘Papa’ swaggering down Fifth Avenue when I was home from boarding school...
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Blog

April 26, 2021

Saying Goodbye to Papa

By Jeff Minick

Ernest Hemingway's full embrace of communist dictatorships should make people a bit wary about fully embracing this master of literature and his work.
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Blog

April 26, 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: The Zone of Interest

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Amis conveys the norm of Nazi thinking and actions, truly capturing what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.”
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Blog

April 23, 2021

Courage Is Worth the Risk

By Annie Holmquist

Courage is a chief virtue, yet our obsession with safety and caution in everything from COVID to children to canceling suggests we are sorely lacking in this quality.
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Blog

April 22, 2021

Derek Chauvin: The Great White Defendant

By Larry Elder

America's soul was not on trial in the Derek Chauvin case. Instead, Chauvin turned into "The Great White Defendant," that Tom Wolfe describes in "The Bonfire of the Vanities."
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Blog

April 8, 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: The French Revolution

By Alexander Riley

The values of the French Revolution are those of every radical revolutionary movement, including the one currently dismantling the basic institutions of American society and culture.
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Polemics & Exchanges

April/May 2021

No Mere Christian

Chronicles editors respond to letters from readers, on the subjects of C. S. Lewis, the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, and complaints in general about articles that challenge readers' worldviews, in the April/May 2021 "Polemics & Exchanges."
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Reviews

April/May 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: April/May 2021

By Catharine Savage Brosman, Alexander Riley

Our contributors review some modern classics: Martin Amis's The Zone of Interest and Pierre Gaxotte's The French Revolution.
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Society & Culture

April/May 2021

The Tiger, the Lion, and the Old Man

By Wayne Allensworth

Grow weary of winter. Rejoice in spring. Be watchful for the tiger, mindful of the lion.
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Columns

April/May 2021

A Badge of Honor

By Taki Theodoracopulos

In our current era, even William Shakespeare is getting "canceled." If a writer hasn't been canceled in one way or another, they're probably no good.
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Reviews

April/May 2021

Historians Are Either Hedgehogs or Foxes

By Barry Alan Shain

Recently departed Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn's final book, Illuminating History shines a light on the making of history and contrasts its scientific and storytelling aspects. If only Bailyn had viewed his own work as clearly...
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Reviews

April/May 2021

Books in Brief: April/May 2021

By Donald Livingston, John Greenville

Reviews of William Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist and Joseph F. Johnston, Jr.'s The Decline of Nations.
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Blog

March 26, 2021

Battling COVID: A Personal Score

By Srdja Trifkovic

A personal tale of combatting COVID-19 triggered double pneumonia reveals a great deal about the disease, and about the human condition.
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Blog

March 25, 2021

Wokeness Is No Laughing Matter

By Martin Cothran

Even though our dour tech overlords lack even the most basic understanding of irony, that does not stop them from trying to regulate our humor.
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Blog

March 22, 2021

Books in Brief: America's Revolutionary Mind

By Paul Gottfried

This 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 it is required reading.
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Blog

March 12, 2021

Halting the Energizer Bunny of ‘Wokeness’

By Jeff Minick

The only way Americans can make their voices heard when fighting against cancel culture is to put their money where their mouth is.
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Blog

March 11, 2021

What the Editors are Reading: The Canterbury Tales

By Stephen B. Presser

Much of Chaucer is missed with the translation of Middle English, although there are extraordinarily rich efforts to bring him to a broader audience.
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Blog

March 10, 2021

Books and Those Who Read Them Are the Real Endangered Species

By Jeff Minick

Only 55 percent of Americans with advanced degrees read at least one novel or short story in the last year. Readers as a whole are dying out.
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Blog

March 2, 2021

The Brave New World of Children’s Propaganda

By Annie Holmquist

From library books, to school programs, to television shows, today's children are inundated with woke propaganda from all angles. It's time for parents to push back.
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Reviews

March 2021

Books in Brief: March 2021

By Mark G. Brennan, Paul Gottfried

Reviews of C. Bradley Thompson's book on the beliefs of the Founding Fathers, America's Revolutionary Mind, and of O. Carter Snead's history and philosophy of bioethics, What It Means to Be Human.
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Reviews

March 2021

Haunts of Hobbits

By Derek Turner

No fictional universe has attracted as much obsessive attention as Tolkien's Middle-earth. It was born of Tolkien's long immersion in Anglo-Saxon and early medieval scholarship, his philological knowledge, and inspired by the settings of his life.
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Reviews

March 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: March 2021

By Mark G. Brennan, Stephen B. Presser

In the March issue, Books Editor Mark G. Brennan reviews Winners Take All, and Legal Affairs Editor Stephen B. Presser recommends Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
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Society & Culture

March 2021

The Ride of the ‘Woke’ Valkyries

By R.J. Stove

Composer Richard Wagner was vastly influential and yet has been dismissed of late as "fascist," "essentialist," and "triggering." For the "woke" any attack against Wagner as a contributor to the Western canon is legitimate, however peevish or glib.
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Society & Culture

March 2021

The Post-Marxist Left’s Race Problem

By Grant Havers

The left has largely abandoned Marxist concerns with class struggle. In fact, there's growing suspicion among leftists that Marxism is in reality a species of white supremacy, precisely because it devotes more attention to class than to race.
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Blog

February 24, 2021

Books in Brief: Sicily ’43

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Catharine Savage Brosman reviews James Holland's book Sicily 43' recounting the first assault on "Fortress Europe."
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Blog

February 24, 2021

Books in Brief: Catholic and Identitarian

By Jerry D. Salyer

Are Catholicism and nationalism compatible? That's what Julien Langella examines in his book Catholic & Indentitarian.
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Blog

February 16, 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: The Unheavenly City

By Alexander Riley

What explains the differences in class cultures in various neighborhoods?
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Blog

February 9, 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: Latin Alive

By John Greenville

The rush to learn Mandarin Chinese is overlooking the huge benefits that the Latin language can confer on students.
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Blog

February 3, 2021

The Curious Warnings of Kipling’s ‘Copybook Headings’

By Annie Holmquist

Rudyard Kipling is more prescient today than ever. His poetry is rich with wisdom that should not go ignored.
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Reviews

February 2021

Books in Brief: February 2021

By Catharine Savage Brosman, Jerry D. Salyer

Reviews of Julien Langella's book on the compatibility of Catholicism and nationalism, Catholic & Indentitarian, and Sicily '43, James Holland's examination of the Sicilian campaign of WWII.
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View

February 2021

Effeminate Cruelty

By Anthony Esolen

America's current "anarcho-tyranny" is characterized by a particularly effeminate kind of cruelty, which is indirect, furtive, and "humane." It takes three major forms...
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Reviews

February 2021

Middle American Aviatrix

By Roger D. McGrath

Taking Flight examines the courageous story of female pilot and flight instructor Nadine Ramsey, a WWII "WASP" and P-38 Lightning aviatrix, who overcame familial and personal tragedies to pursue her calling.
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Reviews

February 2021

Dilution of Heroes

By Patrick J. Walsh

It was the great men of France, Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle, who were essential in forging that nation's political institutions and its body of administrative and civil law, Patrick Gueniffey writes in Napoleon and de Gaulle.
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Blog

January 29, 2021

Books in Brief: The Crusader Strategy

By Timothy D. Lusch

A review of the medieval military history Crusader Strategy by Steve Tibble.
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Reviews

February 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: February 2021

By Mark G. Brennan, Alexander Riley

In the February issue, Mark Brennan recommends Latin Alive, and guest contributor Alexander Riley recommends The Unheavenly City.
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Blog

January 28, 2021

There’s More Than One Way to Burn a Book

By Jeff Minick

A librarian explains the systematic way in which old books have been quietly removed from public consumption over the years.
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Blog

January 27, 2021

Books in Brief: A Small Farm Future

By Derek Turner

A review of an ecological treatise by Chris Smaje, A Small Farm Future.
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Blog

January 22, 2021

A Book to Hoard Before It Gets Cancelled

By John Greenville

John Greenville reviews The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) by William McNeill.
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Blog

January 8, 2021

Our Words Matter: Writing in the Age of Communication

By Jeff Minick

Practically anyone can learn to write clear, concise English, but they must be taught. This is where so many of our schools and teachers fail our young people.
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Blog

January 4, 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: Lanterns on the Levee

By William Murchison

William Murchison reviews Lanterns on the Levee (1941) by William Alexander Percy
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Reviews

January 2021

Books in Brief: January 2021

By Derek Turner, Timothy D. Lusch

Reviews of Steve Tibble's medieval military history, Crusader Strategy and an agricultural, ecological treatise by Chris Smaje, A Small Farm Future.
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Blog

December 31, 2020

What the Editors Are Reading: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke

By Taki Theodoracopulos

Taki Theodoracopulos discusses Our Man Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer.
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Reviews

January 2021

The French Soul, in Stone

By Jorge González-Gallarza Hernández

Paris was Christendom’s second capital and the seat of a powerful diocese when Bishop Maurice de Sully ordered Notre-Dame built in 1160. Agnès Poirier's book reminds us that France remains Catholic at heart, despite a thick layer of secularism.
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Blog

December 30, 2020

Orwell's Coming Up for Air Is Prophetic for Our Times

By George McCartney

George McCartney recalls a prophetic classic by George Orwell.
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Reviews

January 2021

The Sepulcher as Political Symbol

By John M. DeJak

The bones and dust of the Italian poet Dante were a political football for the warring factions of Italy long after his death, Guy Raffa writes in Dante's Bones. He who possessed Dante's remains symbolically controlled the country's future.
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Blog

December 29, 2020

A Reading List to Drive the ‘Woke’ Crowd Crazy

By Annie Holmquist

True diversity lies in understanding those who think differently from yourself. Bearing that in mind, here are a few books progressives might want to read.
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Reviews

January 2021

Union Without Unity

By Betsy Clarke

Richard Kreitner’s book Break It Up chronicles the rocky history of the American union and the many secession movements that have arisen from colonial times to current-day separatists such as the ill-fated Jonestown and Seattle's CHAZ.
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Reviews

January 2021

What the Editors Are Reading: January 2021

By William Murchison, John Greenville

Reviews of classic books, including William McNeill's 1963 expansive history The Rise of the West and William Alexander Percy's memoir of the American South, Lanterns on the Levee.
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Blog

December 17, 2020

Books in Brief: Cynical Theories

By John Greenville

John Greenville reviews Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.
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Blog

December 16, 2020

Books in Brief: 10,000 Not Out: The History of The Spectator 1828-2020

By Derek Turner

Derek Turner reviews 10,000 Not Out: The History of The Spectator 1828-2020, by David Butterfield.
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Blog

December 1, 2020

The Science of 21st Century Serfdom

By Anders Koskinen

As tech giants pull the strings of our 21st century world, it is time for Americans to revolt against the new religion that science has put in place of traditional faith.
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Reviews

December 2020

What the Editors Are Reading: December 2020

By George McCartney, Taki Theodoracopulos

Taki Theodoracopulos reads Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century and George McCartney reads George Orwell's Coming Up for Air
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Blog

November 30, 2020

What the Editors Are Reading: Who Owns America?

By Jack Trotter

Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence remains a classic of American political thought and rhetoric. It was intended in part as a sequel to the better-known I’ll Take My Stand
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Reviews

December 2020

The Disillusionment of Diversity

By Alexander Riley

In Human Diversity, Charles Murray summarizes the evidence from neuroscience and behavioral genetics that some significant portion of the causes of social disparities along sexual, racial, and class lines are based on genetic inheritance.
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Reviews

December 2020

The Adolescent Empire

By Charles W. Sharpe, Jr.

Each of the world's empires has been framed around an ideal human type, James Kurth argues in The American Way of Empire. The American empire was designed by the post-World War II man and born on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
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Society & Culture

December 2020

Vipers in Ivory

By Anthony Esolen

Reflections on three decades of teaching and defending Western civilization while its academic enemies gained power.
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Reviews

December 2020

Books in Brief: December 2020

By Mark G. Brennan, Derek Turner

Reviews of Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and 10,000 Not Out: The History of The Spectator by David Butterfield.
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Reviews

December 2020

What I Learned From the Left

By Mark G. Brennan, Stephen B. Presser, Paul Gottfried, Robert L. Paquette, Pedro Gonzalez, Alexander Riley

In this new Review section feature, Chronicles authors and editors recommend significant books and authors from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.
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Blog

November 23, 2020

What the Editors Are Reading: The Politics

By Paul Gottfried

What makes Aristotle’s view of political life so remarkable is its total differentness from current political attitudes. Aristotle was not politically correct.
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Blog

November 20, 2020

Americans are Finally Growing Weary of Lockdowns

By Jeffrey Tucker

As the months drag on and state governments implement new rules heading into the holidays, Americans are getting quite fed up with COVID restrictions.
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Editorials

November 2020

Considering Judge Barrett

By Stephen B. Presser

Amy Coney Barrett is an adherent of Antonin Scalia’s judicial philosophy, Scalia being the most celebrated proponent of originalism and textualism. Adding her to the Court may shift it in a conservative direction for the next generation.
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Polemics & Exchanges

November 2020

November 2020 Polemics: His Thoughts Are Not Ours

Letters from Chronicles readers, with occasional responses from the magazine's editors and writers.
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Reviews

November 2020

What the Editors Are Reading: November 2020

By Jack Trotter, Paul Gottfried

Paul Gottfried reads Aristotle's Politics and Jack Trotter reads the Southern Agrarian manifesto, Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence
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Reviews

November 2020

Books in Brief: November 2020

By Mark G. Brennan, Catharine Savage Brosman

Reviews of David Stebenne's Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America and Éric Vuillard's The Order of the Day
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Reviews

November 2020

Innocence and Experience

By Derek Turner

Are human beings essentially killer apes, or egalitarian pacifists? In Humankind, Rutger Bregman argues we are not as bad as we believe we are, and by believing we are bad, we may be making ourselves so.
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Reviews

November 2020

The Serfs of Silicon Valley

By John M. DeJak

An oligarchy has arisen from the über-rich of Silicon Valley, served by dispossessed, monastic tech-serfs and a new cultural “clerisy” in academia, media, and religious institutions, Joel Kotkin argues in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism
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Reviews

October 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By Mark G. Brennan, James Kalb

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) by Bernard Bailyn, and The End of the Modern World (1950) by Romano Guardini.
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Reviews

October 2020

Secession Becomes Thinkable

By Donald Livingston

America is coming apart and is "already two nations," F. H. Buckley argues. Once unthinkable, a breakup looks increasingly likely. But can it be done constitutionally and peacefully? Donald Livingston reviews Buckley's case in "American Secession."
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Reviews

October 2020

The Poor Man's Sam Francis

By Pedro Gonzalez

America's managerial elite exploits racial and class resentments to enhance its bureaucratic power. This insight and others by Chronicles columnist Sam Francis is imitated but not exceeded today in books like Michael Lind's The New Class War
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Reviews

October 2020

Books in Brief: October 2020

By John M. DeJak, Annie Holmquist

Retroculture: Taking America Back, by William S. Lind and Coming Home: Reclaiming America’s Conservative Soul, by Ted V. McAllister and Bruce P. Frohnen
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Polemics & Exchanges

October 2020

A Conciliar Critique, Etc.

Letters from readers and responses from Chronicles writers on Vatican II and Catholic social doctrine, the Pilgrims and the English Civil War, and on the concept of jury nullification.
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Editorials

September 2020

Playing Pretend With the Founding Fathers

By Paul Gottfried

The radical left and right have now merged in a virulent form of anti-Americanism, says C. Bradley Thompson. He worries about young men reading scary, reactionary thinkers, and then disagreeing with him about the ideas that motivated the founders.
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Reviews

September 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By William Murchison, Mark G. Brennan

The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (1987) by Eric Hobsbawm, and Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955) by Walter Lippmann.
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Reviews

September 2020

What Civil Rights Hath Wrought

By James Kalb

The civil rights movement of the 1960s began with modest goals for changing the public sphere but morphed into an overhaul of every aspect of life. James Kalb reviews Christopher Caldwell’s "Age of Entitlement."
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Reviews

September 2020

Catholic Comfort for a Wounded South

By John M. DeJak

There was a uniquely Catholic contribution to the Confederate cause. John DeJak reviews new scholarship on the political loyalties of Confederate Catholics by Gracjan Kraszewski.
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Reviews

September 2020

Old Story, New Resonances

By Ronald J. Granieri

Modern politics was born in the French Revolution; knowing its history can enrich our understanding of today’s political challenges. Ronald J. Granieri reviews Jeremy Popkin’s latest book, covering events from the Tennis Court Oath to the Terror.
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Reviews

September 2020

Books in Brief

By Paul Gottfried, Edward Welsch

Russian Conservatism, by Paul Robinson (Northern Illinois University Press; 300 pp., $39.95). Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism, by Ed West (Constable/Little, Brown; 432 pp., $17.99).
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Society & Culture

September 2020

Ressentiment: He Hates, Therefore He Is

By Anthony Esolen

"Ressentiment" festers in the mind of a person until it manifests itself as a false sense of moral righteousness. This concept stems from a feeling of inferiority, and perfectly describes the mindset of today's violent rioters.
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Reviews

August 2020

Books in Brief

By Derek Turner, Catharine Savage Brosman

The Shortest Way With Defoe—Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel, by Michael B. Prince (University of Virginia Press; 350 pp., $69.50). Simon the Fiddler, by Paulette Jiles (William Morrow; 352 pp., $27.99).
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Reviews

August 2020

A Decadent Diagnosis

By John M. DeJak

In his most recent book, Ross Douthat analyzes our decadent society from several perspectives—cultural, political, and philosophical. He insists that decadence has interconnected economic, demographic, intellectual, and cultural factors.
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Reviews

August 2020

Slaying Dragons, Coddling Snakes

By Chris Timmers

David Kilcullen argues in The Dragons and the Snakes that the West’s mixed success against non-state adversaries to date compels a more hands-off approach going forward, even if such a strategy contravenes conventional military tactics. ...
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Reviews

August 2020

Solid Strategy, Limited Vision

By Srdja Trifkovic

Metternich was a first-class strategist, but lacked vision. Srdja Trifkovic reviews a recent biography of the Austrian Empire's chief diplomat and geopolitical strategist, written by Wolfram Siemann.
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Reviews

August 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By Catharine Savage Brosman, Stephen B. Presser

Catharine Savage Brosman reviews Marie-Henri Beyle's La Chartreuse de Parme and Stephen B. Presser reviews Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.
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Blog

June 27, 2020

In Memoriam, Jean Raspail (1925-2020)

By Srdja Trifkovic

The French novelist and thinker Jean Raspail died this month. He took a resolute stand against Third World immigration, and condemned communism and capitalism with equal force, as the two monstrous twins born of modernity.
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Reviews

July 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By Taki Theodoracopulos, Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen reviews Pär Lagerkvist's Barabbas and Taki Theodoracopulos reviews Cornwell's Waterloo.
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Reviews

July 2020

The Philosopher's Ball Game

By Vito Chiaravalloti

Vito Chiaravalloti artificially altered his body to become a better baseball player. He reviews Alva Noë's book Infinite Baseball, and reflects on the sport and what it means to be a modern human "cyborg," a mix of biology and technology.
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Reviews

July 2020

Madison Avenue's Soviet Mole

By Jason Michael Morgan

The enigmatic spy David Karr was an advertising genius, the CEO of a major American defense contractor that marketed the AR-15 to Americans, and who collaborated with the Soviet Union for a number of years until his death in 1979.
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Reviews

July 2020

What Made the Founders Happy

By Paul R. DeHart

Carli Conklin's book The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era seeks to harmonize several strains of thought on what the Founders meant in the Declaration when they spoke of an inalienable right to pursue happiness.
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Reviews

July 2020

Books in Brief

By Mark G. Brennan

Mark G. Brennan reviews How Dead Languages Work by Coulter H. George.
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Reviews

June 2020

The Mind Behind Big Brother

By John O'Neill

Few works in literature are as terrifying as 1984, that look into the future written by George Orwell and published in 1949. British scholar Dorian Lynskey unravels the novel’s themes, inspirations, and intentions in his latest book.
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Society & Culture

June 2020

Plague Literature: The Threshing Floor

By Jack Trotter

Since plague is one of those natural disasters whose origin cannot be assigned to human agency, it can pose seemingly insoluble moral problems…Does God in fact directly will suffering, or does he merely permit it?
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Remembering the Right

June 2020

Remembering the Southern Agrarians

By Joe Scotchie

In 1920 a group of writers gathered in Nashville for bi-weekly sessions of reading and dissecting each other’s prose and poetry. The group, who defended the traditional Southern way of life, became known as the Southern Agrarians.
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Reviews

June 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By Srdja Trifkovic, George McCartney

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella of split personality, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) by Paul Kennedy
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Reviews

June 2020

Books in Brief

By Chris Timmers, Peter Hammack

The Art of Statistics, by David Spiegelhalter (Basic Books; 448 pp., $32.00). Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, by Anna Wiener (MCD; 288 pp., $27.00).
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Reviews

June 2020

A Skeptic on the Road of Saints

By John M. DeJak

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan’s latest book chronicles his pilgrimage along the Via Francigena.
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Reviews

June 2020

Empire States of Mind

By Ronald J. Granieri

Although this relatively short book is closer to an extended, episodic essay than to the comprehensive history of the British Empire implied by the title, it is an excellent example of the author’s style. Jeremy Black takes a broad view…
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Reviews

April/May 2020

Books in Brief

By John M. DeJak

John DeJak reviews Václav Benda's The Long Night of the Watchman
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Reviews

April/May 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By Mark G. Brennan, Edward Welsch

Reviews of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile and Diego Gambetta's The Sicilian Mafia
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Reviews

April/May 2020

Hitler vs. the Anglo-Americans

By Srdja Trifkovic

On April 20, Adolf Hitler turns 131. Ten days later comes the 75th anniversary of his earthly demise in the ruins of Berlin, but he is still our contemporary par excellence. He continues to haunt and fascinate. Hitler’s countenance, his very...
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Reviews

April/May 2020

Fatal Amendments

By Betsy Clarke

Enthusiastic defenders of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are fundamentalist cultists—and women and minorities are their victims. At least, that is the thesis of University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks’ new book,...
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Reviews

April/May 2020

Traditionalism Redux

By Derek Turner

War for Eternity strives to show that many modern national conservative and populist movements are paradoxically informed by the arcane intellectual current known as traditionalism.
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Remembering the Right

April/May 2020

Remembering William F. Buckley, Jr.

By Jack Trotter

Two years after the death of the man whom one of his biographers, John Judis, dubbed the patron saint of modern conservatism, Encounter Books brought out a splendidly packaged omnibus volume of his columns and essays, entitled Athwart History:...
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Reviews

March 2020

The American Muse

By Jack Trotter

For almost as long as there have been literary works, there have been literary canons, largely established by bookish pedants who do, indeed, “quarrel unceasingly.” The quarreling began early in the third century B.C. and continues today. The...
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Reviews

March 2020

Dictatorship of the Deranged

By Timothy D. Lusch

A long time ago, I happened upon a cartoon in some publication or other. A single frame—in the vein of Gary Larson—depicted thousands of sheep rushing headlong off a cliff. In the middle of this great multitude, one particular sheep moved in the...
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Columns

March 2020

Singin' the Publishing Blues

By Mark G. Brennan

I like a traveling circus. The American Historical Association’s annual conference periodically sets up its tent at the New York Hilton. Since I live nearby, I subject myself to its clown car of characters every half decade. But this year, I saw...
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Reviews

March 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By Edward Welsch

Perhaps the greatest American autobiography in both the quality of its writing and the import of its content is Whittaker Chambers’ Witness (1952). Sadly, it’s also one of the most neglected by the country’s leftist-dominated intelligentsia.
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Reviews

February 2020

Apologizing for the Bother

By Timothy D. Lusch

“It’s a small, white, scored oval tablet.” A little pill stands between Florent-Claude Labrouste and his planned defenestration. It offers only a temporary reprieve from the meaninglessness of life. As the narrator of Michel Houellebecq’s latest...
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Reviews

February 2020

Nationalism for the Lukewarm

By Paul Gottfried

It seems that Rich Lowry has taken time off from castigating Donald Trump and calling for the prompt removal of Confederate memorial monuments to compose an entire book making “the case for nationalism.” A media launch was provided by Fox News’s...
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Reviews

February 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By Tom Piatak, Annie Holmquist

Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited (1945) while on a six-month leave from the British Army during World War II. It proved a hit with the public, but the critics who had praised Waugh’s earlier satirical novels were less impressed, objecting...
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Reviews

February 2020

Books in Brief

By Tony Outhwaite, Peter Hammack

End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise, by Carl Minzner
and
Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities, by Vaclav Smil
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View

January 2020

The Unbearable Burden of Being

By Anthony Esolen

What has brought upon us the madness of the “transgender,” with all its sad denial of the beauty and particularity of male and female? To see the cause, we must diagnose the malady. It is boredom: an irritable impatience with the things that...
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Remembering the Right

January 2020

Remembering Robert Nisbet

By James Kalb

It is hard to imagine anyone today having a career like Robert Nisbet’s: professor at Berkeley, Arizona, and Columbia; dean and vice-chancellor at the University of California, Riverside; author of widely used sociology textbooks; and co-founder,...
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Reviews

January 2020

An Austrian Frame of Mind

By Jeff Deist

Professor Janek Wasserman, to his credit, is not a polemicist. His new book is indeed a leftist critique of the broad school of economic thought now colloquially referred to as “Austrian,” but it is not only that. It is also a lively and...
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Polemics & Exchanges

January 2020

A Louisiana Lesson

By

If an admiring reviewer’s main purpose is to inspire his reader to run out and buy the book he praises, Professor Randall Ivey has done that for me with his review of Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide (“Chansons by the Bayou,” December 2019)....
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Reviews

January 2020

What the Editors Are Reading

By Catharine Savage Brosman, Stephen B. Presser

The Diary of a Country Priest (1936) by Georges Bernanos is as timely now as ever. It can be appreciated for its powerful Christian vision, its pertinence to today’s social illnesses, and its literary excellence, as shown in narrative technique,...
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Reviews

October 2019

Books in Brief

By Clavin Fisher

From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith, by Sohrab Ahmari (San Francisco: Ignatius Press; 240 pp., $22.95). Sohrab Ahmari: Iranian immigrant, Roman Catholic convert, conservative, New York Post editor, and professiona
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Society & Culture

October 2019

Hope in Little Platoons

By Jeff Minick

For 26 years, I taught hundreds of home-educated students, including my own children. My checkered teaching career also includes a semester in a university, two years at a prison, and two years in a public high school. During my last 15 years of...
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Reviews

June 2019

Unconscious Beauty

By Catharine Savage Brosman

This handsome hardbound volume, an authoritative study in art history that can pass as a coffee-table book, is billed by its publisher as “the first-ever history of the representation of dreams in Western painting.”
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Reviews

May 2019

Bodio’s Country

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Stephen Bodio is a memoirist, journalist, critic, sportswriter, naturalist, outdoorsman, hunter, falconer, bird breeder, dog breeder, and now a novelist.
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Reviews

May 2019

Books In Brief

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

The French dislike what they call “Anglo-American economics” even more than they dislike English and American cookery; also, more recently, progressive Anglo-American views regarding the supposed identicality between the sexes.
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Reviews

May 2019

What the Editors Are Reading

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Always keen to read travel books about Mexico, I picked up an elderly copy (printed by A. Appleton & Company in 1921) of Viva Mexico! by Charles Macomb Flandrau that I came across in a local bookshop.
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April 2019

Poet Against Empire

By Philip Jenkins

When I mention that I am reading Robinson Jeffers, even cultivated and well-read people look bemused; the name seems obscure. By way of explanation, I borrow the closing words of the classic gangster film The Roaring Twenties: “He used to be a...
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In Our Time

March 2019

Homage to Edward Abbey

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

The March issue of Chronicles coincides with the 30th anniversary of the passing of novelist, essayist, poet, and conservationist Edward Abbey.
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Reviews

February 2019

Glimpses Delightful and Rare

By Joseph Pearce

One of the root problems facing our beleaguered world is that many of our contemporaries are belaboring the past as a burden, believing that the legacy and traditions of Western Civilization are a millstone around modernity’s neck.
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Columns

December 2018

Too Dangerous to Read

By Philip Jenkins

I offer a moral dilemma. Are there books or fictional works so dangerous that they should not be taught in school or college, and that should as far as possible be kept from a general audience?
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Reviews

December 2018

Out of Troy

By Jack Trotter

Author of several novels and a memorable autobiographical work entitled Our Father’s Fields (1998), as well as a leading light of the Abbeville Institute, James Kibler has produced in the present work an indispensable study of the classical...
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Editorials

October 2018

What Good Poetry Can Be

By Catharine Savage Brosman

A long and distinguished literary career ended on June 23, 2018, with the death of New England poet Donald Hall. A versatile and prolific author, he served in 2006-07 as poet laureate of the United States.
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Reviews

October 2018

“Yet Britain Set the World Ablaze . . . ”

By Derek Turner

The untidy title—the “century” is really a century-and-a-bit—signals the complexity of that far-off, still close country so sentimentalized by the right and impugned by the left.
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Reviews

July 2018

Anglo Magic

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Field of Blood is one of the best new novels I have read in many a year, a superbly written book by a Russian scholar and analyst who is also a careful artist, a stylist, and a poet in prose and in form who has accomplished what few essayists and...
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Editorials

July 2018

Tom Wolfe, R.I.P.

By Tony Outhwaite

When Tom Wolfe’s debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in November 1987, the book was greeted with effusive praise and became a best-seller, although some literati seemed offended by Wolfe’s highly descriptive prose, the...
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Reviews

May 2018

Thank You, Auden!

By Frank Brownlow

With the publication of volumes V and VI, the Princeton edition of W.H. Auden’s collected prose is complete in almost 5,000 pages, covering over 45 years of a writing life.
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Reviews

February 2018

Time’s Terpsichorean

By Derek Turner

Anthony Powell’s million-word, 12-volume novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is one of the great achievements of postwar English literature, attracting near-universal praise for its subtle and textured evocation of England between World...
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Reviews

January 2018

What’s Sweet and Proper

By Kevin O’Brien

Joseph Pearce has created what he calls a “verse tapestry,” a weaving together of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, two English poets whose experiences in World War I brought them to profound anger and despondency, each of them...
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Reviews

January 2018

How to Live

By David Middleton

In her Preface to this collection, Catharine Savage Brosman tells the reader that these essays are of three kinds: recollections of her own life and family, commentaries on literature, and examinations of the current state of American culture.
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Society & Culture

December 2017

Surrounded by Books

By John Lukacs

Surrounded by books has been a main circumstance of my long life. So it is now, near the end of my 94th year, when I am in my large library of perhaps 18,000 books in the western wing of my house in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
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Reviews

November 2017

Stepping Ashore

By Constance Rowell Mastores

The best poetry—great poetry—happens when sound, rhythm, and image bring about a mysterious feeling of wholeness that somehow draws mind, body, and spirit together in what both Yeats and Eliot envisioned as a unified dance.
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Reviews

October 2017

Realism of the Real

By Joseph Pearce

In calendar terms, the novel is set in the early 1990’s, a time that is further away from us than we care to realize. Although many of us remember the early 90’s, we forget how long ago it was, not in terms of years, a quarter of a century being...
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Reviews

October 2017

Making It Close

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Bearings and Distances is a considerable achievement in construction, technique, narration, drama, characterization, human insight, and most other things I can think of that go to make a novel a fine novel.
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Reviews

September 2017

Books in Brief

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

This is an interesting and well-executed account of the compositional, publishing, critical, and popular history of Victor Hugo’s famous novel that may—or may not—be “the novel of the century.”
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Reviews

September 2017

Still Unexplained

By Frank Brownlow

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), dean of St. Patrick’s Church of Ireland cathedral in Dublin, was a most remarkable man.
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Reviews

July 2017

What the Editors Are Reading

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Confined to a three-man tent on a rainy day in the canyons of southeastern Utah, I continued by lantern light my rereading of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, first published a quarter-century ago as the first volume in The Border...
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Correspondence

June 2017

Getting Medieval on Middle Age

By Timothy D. Lusch

In my youth, I took degrees in history and philosophy, criminal justice, and law—areas of study that went through the Middle Ages on the way to becoming the grown-up disciplines they are today on the campus of Political Correctness University.
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Society & Culture

June 2017

Sewanee, Deconstructed

By Catharine Savage Brosman

“Make it new!” demanded Ezra Pound. Would he have liked the cover for the outrageous winter 2017 issue of the Sewanee Review, America’s oldest continuously published literary quarterly?
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May 2017

No Place for Humanity: Our Free-Chosen Dystopia

By Daniel McCarthy

Dystopian literature is a moral genre, a critique not only of power but, in its most outstanding classics, of progressivism. Without being conservative or right wing, it is often antileft.
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Society & Culture

April 2017

Reading Huxley Between the Headlines

By Ralph Berry

“Is it time to reread Brave New World?” asks the distinguished historian Anthony Beevor, in a recent article on Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. I think it is.
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Reviews

April 2017

The End and the Beginning

By Scott P. Richert

Return the printed word to its rightful primacy in your imagination by buying and reading this book. Savor its contents; this remarkable collection of essays will whet your appetite for the next “final” volume from John Lukacs.
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Reviews

April 2017

Bizarre Baroque

By Derek Turner

This elegantly translated, superbly annotated new translation of his Tale of Tales—which Benedetto Croce called “the most remarkable book of the Baroque period”—should . . . be of abounding interest to anyone who has any proprietorial regard for...
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Correspondence

September 2016

Adventures in Education

By Jonathan D. Brand

Last spring, students at Chelsea Academy performed A Man for All Seasons. Among the play’s many memorable scenes, the exchange in which Sir Thomas More advises Richard Rich to choose teaching over the pursuit of power, wealth, and fame...
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Society & Culture

August 2016

Faulkner in Japan: The “American Century”

By Jason Michael Morgan

In August of 1955, William Faulkner traveled to Japan. Based in the out-of-the-way mountain province of Nagano, Faulkner lectured and temple-toured for two weeks, doing the bidding of the U.S. State Department, which had sponsored his trip.
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Reviews

April 2016

The Price of Being Human

By Stella Nesanovich

In her tenth volume of poetry, Catharine Savage Brosman has given readers a wide array of skillfully written and insightful poems that capture the poet’s keen observations of nature, her journeys from New Mexico to Antarctica, and her sense of...
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Reviews

March 2016

Sui Generis

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

As every reader acquainted with the Sobran corpus will expect, there are many wonderful things here. Indeed, the book is full of them.
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Reviews

March 2016

Timely, and Timeless

By John M. DeJak

“An essay is not an exercise in ‘thinking out loud.’ Rather, it is thinking while writing, or even perhaps the writing is, in its own way, our thinking things out.”
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Reviews

February 2016

A Christian Humanist

By Carl E. Olson

Having access to personal correspondence and other private papers is every biographer’s dream, a potential difference between a decent biography and a great biography. In the case of Russell Kirk, the advantage was huge.
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Reviews

February 2016

Kidnapped

By Frank Brownlow

Aldersey-Williams is obsessed, he says, with Browne, a fascinating combination of writer and protoscientist who, he believes, is “insufficiently known and unjustly neglected” by literary people and scientists alike.
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Reviews

January 2016

Religion Is Always There

By Christie Davies

The varied and complex relations between religion and power can be understood only by means of extensive comparisons, between nations and across time. Who better to demonstrate this than Prof. David Martin, the doyen of the comparative sociology...
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Society & Culture

January 2016

The Future of Publishing

By Christopher Sandford

In 2004, a middle-aged English businessman named George Courtauld decided to put together a slim, illustrated album for his three young sons. It was called The Pocket Book of Patriotism.
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Reviews

December 2015

Truth in Poetry

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) is considered to be among the most important American poets of the 20th century. She was a U.S. Poet Laureate and won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and the Neustadt International Prize.
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Vital Signs

December 2015

Becoming Like Little Children

By Joseph Pearce

What is it about the genre of fantasy fiction that makes it so enduringly popular? Is it a further sign of modernity’s malaise and its inability to cope with reality, or is it perhaps a sign of hope in our deplorably darkened days?
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Reviews

November 2015

The Incomparable Max

By Frank Brownlow

Back in 1965, reviewing Lord David Cecil’s life of Beerbohm, W.H. Auden wrote that Beerbohm’s kind of “pure” essay, written “only to produce aesthetic satisfaction,” was a genre “to which no reader under sixty can bring himself to attend.”
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Reviews

November 2015

Beautiful Apologetics

By Jason Waskovich

Art and literature are powerful mediums to convey timeless truths. In the Introduction to Catholic Literary Giants, Joseph Pearce declares the power of art to evangelize, a defense of the Catholic Faith he terms the “apologetics of beauty.”
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Reviews

October 2015

More Than an Inkling

By Joseph Pearce

The Oxford Inklings by veteran Lewis and Tolkien scholar Colin Duriez, is a delightful book that will warm the hearts of those who share the author’s enthusiasm for his subject.
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Vital Signs

October 2015

The Poet: Companion of the Common Man

By Micah Mattix, Steven L. Jones

What is the role of the poet in society? In a frequently misunderstood remark, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in “A Defence of Poetry” (1821) that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
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August 2015

Poetry’s Place in America

By Catharine Savage Brosman

When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited London in 1868, he was invited by Queen Victoria to an audience at Windsor Castle. She complimented him on his poetry, assuring him that all her servants read it.
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View

August 2015

The Worst Verse Since 1915

By R.J. Stove

Exactly 50 years ago, T.S. Eliot died. Exactly 100 years ago, “Prufrock” appeared. What better moment, then, to perform the long-overdue public service of identifying the single worst poem to have been published during the last century?
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Reviews

August 2015

My Only Light

By Frank Brownlow

One of the things that James VI of Scotland liked about becoming James I of England—apart from the money—was that as head of the Church of England he would never be bossed about by a Scotch Calvinist minister again.
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Vital Signs

June 2015

Revisiting Brideshead

By Joseph Pearce

Waugh’s Christian faith found expression in the novels published in the years following his conversion, especially in A Handful of Dust, which took its title from a line in The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, whose own conversion to...
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Reviews

June 2015

Blessed Be the Passionate

By John Derbyshire

The object of passion might be well-nigh anything at all, so long of course as it is not vicious: stamp collecting or field hockey, cabinetry or the Civil War, boxing or bell ringing; in one case known to me personally, the hand-manufacture of...
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Reviews

June 2015

A Tale of Two Keys

By Clyde Wilson

Everybody knows that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key as he watched the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812.
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Reviews

May 2015

The Academic Shakespeareans

By Frank Brownlow

The last 30 years or so have seen a remarkable shift in the understanding of English religious history at the time of the Reformation.
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Vital Signs

April 2015

The Nightmare That Wakes Us Up

By Joseph Pearce

G.K. Chesterton had a low opinion of his own abilities as a novelist. “[M]y real judgment of my own work,” he confessed, “is that I have spoilt a number of jolly good ideas in my time”.
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Reviews

April 2015

Biting the Bullet

By Andrei Navrozov

The flyleaf of this book sports a quote (“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original”) from an enthusiastic notice in the New York Times Book Review of a new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, which the...
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Reviews

April 2015

Mismatch

By Frank Brownlow

Philip Larkin, the poet-librarian of Hull University, died December 2, 1985, over 29 years ago. In the years since Andrew Motion published the first biography (1993), and Anthony Thwaite published both the first complete edition of the poems...
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Reviews

March 2015

Good Grief

By James O. Tate

Poetry has to me never been what I have so often heard called a problem, and that was so for the simplest of reasons: It was never presented to me as a promblem until I was advanced in school, after which it was reformulated as a target of...
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Reviews

March 2015

Defining Work

By John M. DeJak

This collection harkens back to a bygone era when the essay was a common medium of the literary artist.
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Vital Signs

March 2015

Cultural Cleansing, Phase One

By Clyde Wilson

In 1833 James Fenimore Cooper returned from a European tour to Coopers town—founded by his father, one of the first pioneers into the dangerous frontier of New York beyond the Hudson Valley.
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Reviews

February 2015

Everyman’s Poet

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Jared Carter, who has retired from a career in publishing, is a Midwestern poet of stature. He won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Poets’ Prize; he has had a Guggenheim fellowship and two fellowships from the...
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Correspondence

February 2015

Two Ways of Dying

By Tom Piatak

Thomas More’s world was one in which reminders of death were all around, and also one in which most people reflexively accepted the tenets of Christianity, including the knowledge that, in the words of an earlier English playwright, “the...
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Vital Signs

February 2015

Epiphanies of Grace

By Joseph Pearce

Oscar Wilde wrote several first-rate plays, on which his literary reputation principally rests, and a number of mostly second-rate poems.
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View

December 2014

Why Christians Need the Classical Tradition

By E. Christian Kopff

One of the most intriguing paradoxes of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the pervasive presence of pagan classical antiquity in what was meant to be (and is) Europe’s greatest Christian poem.
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December 2014

Dante’s Human Comedy

By Fr. Hugh Barbour

Prima sedes a nemine indicator: “The First See is judged by no one.” Thus reads Canon 1404 of the current Code of Canon Law of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, and Canon 1556 of the previous code.
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Perspective

December 2014

Dante’s Path to Heaven

By Thomas Fleming

Dante Alighieri died here in Ravenna, a little city where any sane man or woman might well choose to live and die. Like most people, I come here from time to time to stare stupidly at the Roman and Byzantine mosaics.
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Reviews

December 2014

A Question of Fairness

By Andrei Navrozov

It all comes down to questions of fairness. On January 27, 2007, a journalist by the name of Peter Finn published in the Washington Post an interview with Ivan Tolstoy, a literary scholar distantly related to the famous writer.
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Reviews

November 2014

Underground Man

By Jerry D. Salyer

Was it fair of Solzhenitsyn to call Peter the Great “a mediocre man, if not a barbarian”? I honestly don’t know.
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Reviews

November 2014

Speaking as an Irishman

By Frank Brownlow

If the best advice one can give an aspiring writer of prose is to study the best models, then Jonathan Swift’s prose, as a lot of people who should know agree, provides the best model of all in English.
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Reviews

November 2014

The Ability to See

By Gerald Russello

Through books on subjects ranging from wine to hunting, music to environmentalism, British philosopher Roger Scruton has constructed a multifaceted attack on liberalism.
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View

September 2014

The Left’s Long March

By Frank Brownlow

On June 2, FOX News’s The Five were discussing the Harvard commencement speech of ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which he pointed out that something like 95 percent of the faculty had supported Obama.
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View

September 2014

Last of the Romans

By E. Christian Kopff

Andrew Crocker did not attend his commencement exercises at Michigan State University in East Lansing on May 2. He was home dealing with family matters. So he missed the awarding of two honorary doctorates.
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Reviews

August 2014

Diversity Where It Counts

By Clyde Wilson

A work of genuine scholarship tells us what we did not know before and does so felicitously—it is a contribution to the world’s body of knowledge.
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Polemics & Exchanges

August 2014

Reading Poe

A reader responds to Egon Richard Tausch's article, "The Writer and the Lawyers" from the May issue.
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Reviews

July 2014

Free Spirit of Literature

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Sam Pickering (born 1941) recently retired from professing English—mostly, it would appear, creative writing. Oh! “Beware! Beware! . . . Weave a circle round him thrice / . . . / For he on honey-dew hath fed / and drunk the milk of paradise.”
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Cultural Revolutions

July 2014

A Chestertonian Assault

By Philip Jenkins

Whenever I receive a new number of The Chesterton Review, I groan inwardly and, from time to time, outwardly. Let me hasten to add that said groan is not a sign of tedium or disappointment—far from it.
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Reviews

June 2014

Black Hole Singing

By John Freeman

The complexities of A Deep but Dazzling Darkness revolve around the central theme of an intense, arduous, and unrelenting struggle for identity.
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June 2014

Digital Enthusiasm

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

At a recent dinner party someone remarked that the two secure careers remaining in America are business and science.
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European Diary

June 2014

Si vis pacem

By Andrei Navrozov

“All may have if they dare try a glorious life or grave.” I saw those words—George Herbert’s, as it turned out—incised into the stonework of a church near Waterloo Station.
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Columns

June 2014

The Way to Translate

By Philip Jenkins

There are people who think the classics are a dated luxury. Anyone who believes that should stay far away from the Christian Bible.
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Vital Signs

May 2014

The Writer and the Lawyers

By Egon Richard Tausch

Every fact of Edgar Allan Poe’s life is hotly disputed, as there is a wide range of sources, primary and secondary, to sift through, as well as thousands of utterly contradictory letters from dozens of Poe’s contemporaries.
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Cultural Revolutions

May 2014

Eugenio Corti, R.I.P.

By Thomas Fleming

With the death of Eugenio Corti on February 4, Italian literature has lost the last of its great masters.
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Cultural Revolutions

April 2014

Eugenio Corti, R.I.P.

By Thomas Fleming

With the death of Eugenio Corti on February 4, Italian literature has lost the last of its great masters.
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View

March 2014

Upstarts Like Shakespeare

By William Murchison

I’ve no more desire than the next Anglophile with a framed colored engraving of the queen-empress on his office wall to pull down the aristocracy; to take away their estates and paintings and seats in the Lords and ancient Rollses resting on...
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Perspective

March 2014

In Search of the Bourgeoisie

By Thomas Fleming

“How beastly the bourgeois is,” sneered D.H. Lawrence, “especially the male of the species.” What courage and imagination a writer must have to revile a social class that has been under attack for over a generation!
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Reviews

October 2013

Light of Being

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Lest readers misunderstand, it must be said at the outset that these poems, selected from "Psaumes de tous mes temps" (1974), by Patrice de La Tour du Pin (1911-75), are not translations, even rough ones, from the Psalms of the Bible.
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Perspective

August 2013

Goodbye to All What?

By Thomas Fleming

As far back as I can remember, I had the feeling that I had been born some time after the end of everything that mattered.
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View

August 2013

End of the World of Books

By John Lukacs

No matter. Next day, my relief was gone. I know that so much of my world has vanished. The world of books.
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View

August 2013

Books Are for Blockheads!

By Jack Trotter

Back in April, my old friend D.B. “Dukie” Kitchens called to inform me that I should soon expect in the mail an invitation to the inaugural Patriot Book Awards ceremony, to be held in Atlanta in late May. “What did I do to deserve this honor?”...
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Reviews

January 2013

The Joys of Winter

By David Middleton

The poems in this ninth full-length collection by Catharine Savage Brosman could have been composed only by a poet who has lived, studied, and written well through the spring, summer, and autumn and now on into the winter of life.
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Columns

December 2012

Books and Lovers

By Taki Theodoracopulos

Alexander Walker, however, disagrees with Hume about monogamy, calling marriage not merely a social but a natural institution. In other words, once hitched you don’t fool around, and he brings in apes as an example.
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Columns

August 2012

Prophecies Fulfilled

By Justin Raimondo

Ray Bradbury’s passing, at the age of 91, evokes sadness and nostalgia for the lost world of my youth.
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Cultural Revolutions

August 2012

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

By Wayne Allensworth

On June 5, we lost not only one of our finest writers but a true American storyteller and one of the last of the book people. For Ray Bradbury, who passed away at the age of 91, was, like the remnant that Montag joins at the end of...
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March 2012

Democracy and the Internet

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

At least one historian has noted that democracy is inherently inflationary. The phenomenon of inflation is not restricted to money and finance. Too much of anything reduces the value of that thing, and others with it.
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European Diary

February 2012

The Dream Dealer

By Andrei Navrozov

When I hear of the books in the history of publishing that were self-published, I react like Lenin, who, on hearing of the 5,000 print run of Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000, scoffed that it was “a colossal waste of paper.”
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Perspective

December 2011

Rome and Jerusalem

By Thomas Fleming

William Blake was quite mad, even madder than most Swedenborgians—and that is saying a good deal—but Christians less insane than Blake have dreamed of building a new Jerusalem where the unpromising specimens of humanity they had known all their...
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European Diary

December 2011

Devil's Mama

By Andrei Navrozov

The rockets that, according to Khrushchev, were coming off his production line “like sausages” ran on kerosene and liquid oxygen. So did Soviet foreign policy.
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View

October 2011

Unreal Bodies, Unholy Blood

By Jack Trotter

The vampire, possibly the most enduring mythic figure of the modern age, emerged out of the shadows of the Enlightenment. . .The emergence of the Romantic vampire cannot be adequately understood without reference to The Vampyre (1819), a novella...
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Reviews

October 2011

Medieval Modernism

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Unlike certain 19th-century poets of difficult character or seemingly foredoomed, whom Paul Verlaine called maudits (accursed)—Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval, Corbière, Verlaine himself—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a pleasant,...
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Vital Signs

October 2011

Ayn the Antichrist

By John C. Seiler, Jr.

“Who is John Galt?” again rings throughout the land. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s doorstop novel chronicling a general strike of the productive against the “looters,” gains resonance during times of increasing government control.
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Vital Signs

October 2011

Conan Doyle

By Christopher Sandford

On the evening of September 7, 1919, 60-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle sat down in a darkened room in Portsmouth, England, to speak with his son Kingsley, who had died in the Spanish-influenza epidemic ten months earlier.
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Columns

September 2011

Under an Honorable Spell

By George McCartney

Even now that he’s a young man, Liam still thinks the world of Harry Potter. For him, it’s now a matter of nostalgia, I suspect. It all began when he started reading J.K. Rowling’s stories of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as a...
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Vital Signs

September 2011

Thomas Wolfe

By Jeff Minick

Sometimes a great book and the place in which it was read combine to cast a spell so potent and so enduring that both book and place become forever entwined in the memory of the reader.
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Cultural Revolutions

September 2011

No More Books

By Clyde Wilson

This is strange to say, but observation bears it out: Almost all publishers and most booksellers and librarians neither know nor care anything about books.
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Reviews

August 2011

Anglo-Saxon Reality

By Ray Olson

Some poems in Celtic languages are older, but the earliest sizable body of vernacular literature in Europe is the Old English, dating, by liberal estimation, from the seventh century to the twelfth.
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Polemics & Exchanges

August 2011

Community Revisited

Dr. Wilson reassures me that I did not write in vain. There is a community-loving strain of American fiction, and I wonder whether it might be more fully rediscovered if one plumbed the best-seller lists before 1960.
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Columns

August 2011

Peace With Zulus

By Philip Jenkins

Like most literate Brits of my generation, I grew up immersed in the book 1066 and All That, the brilliant parody of historical writing published in 1930 by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman.
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Vital Signs

July 2011

An American Family Covenant

Andrew Lytle used to describe puritanism as “putting evil in the object,” whether that object be demon rum, tyrannical government, heretical beliefs, or defiling the environment.
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Reviews

July 2011

Late in the Day

By H.R. Stoneback

This volume—which ranges widely in form and motif, from the sacred to the profane, from the personal past to the larger cultural and historical past, from a 1680 massacre of Franciscan martyrs to the cultural chaos of the 1960’s—provides ample...
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View

June 2011

The King James Bible at 400: Love's Labor's Lost

By Aaron D. Wolf

I was in seventh grade, and we were downstate for the annual Bible Bowl. Our little fundamentalist school fielded a team every year. We were the most conservative of fundamentalists, which mean that we were King James Only (affectionately KJVO).
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Correspondence

December 2010

The Bookman

By Wayne Allensworth

I remember Granddad as an old man, sitting in his reading chair or working in his garden, but you could still see the younger man in him, the one who had ridden the rails during the Depression, seeking work in California and Oregon with his...
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Correspondence

November 2010

In Search of Flannery O'Connor

By Jeff Minick

In late June, a friend and I traveled into Central Georgia, looking for Flannery O’Connor. Mary Ann had never heard of Flannery O’Connor. She didn’t know Hazel Motes from a hole in the ground and assured me she had never encountered “A Good Man...
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Vital Signs

November 2010

On the Sullivan Translation of David, Part II

By Timothy Murphy

This is the second part of a speech on poet Alan Sullivan that Timothy Murphy has delivered to Catholic and Protestant congregations on the High Plains. (The first part appeared in the October issue.) Mr. Sullivan, a frequent contributor to...
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Vital Signs

October 2010

On the Sullivan Translation of David

By Timothy Murphy

The Sumerian epic Gilgamesh predates King David by 2,000 years, so we know that poetry was an ancient art in the time of the king. But David is the first poet in human history whom we know by name, and we regard him as the father of lyric...
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Reviews

October 2010

View From the Left Bank

By Catharine Savage Brosman

After the Great War, Sylvia Beach founded, with money from her mother, Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop and lending library on the Left Bank in Paris. As the American expatriate wrote much later, “I have always loved books...
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Cultural Revolutions

September 2010

Thomas Molnar, R.I.P.

By John Zmirak

On July 10, in Richmond, Virginia, the intellectual historian Thomas Molnar went to his reward, leaving behind an array of gorgeous ruins. By these I mean not his works, which were masterfully crafted and will endure.
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View

August 2010

Where the Demons Dwell: The Antichrist Right

By Jerry D. Salyer

Those blissfully ignorant of right-wing soap opera will have never noticed the Antichrist Right, a loose coalition of writers who regard the Church as the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization.
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Reviews

July 2010

Mystery Tour

By Wilmer Mills

Larry Johnson’s first book of poems, Veins, promises an engagement with history and tradition that is respectful, lively, and current. Open to any page at random, and you will find examples of real language handled by a poet who obviously...
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Reviews

May 2010

Prometheus Unbound

By Catharine Savage Brosman

This volume, belonging to the Iowa Whitman Series, is identified as “the 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition” of Leaves of Grass, third edition (1860). Originally issued in 1855, at the author’s expense, the collection was revised and...
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Reviews

April 2010

Brush the Distance

By John Freeman

Catharine Savage Brosman’s latest book, Breakwater, is a stimulating addition to her always intriguing poetic realm. The book is packed with superlative individual poems, and their cumulative effect strikes this reviewer as majestic.
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Cultural Revolutions

April 2010

We Hardly Knew You

By James O. Tate

First, you realized that “Holden Caulfield” wasn’t innocent anymore; then, that he was old; then, that he is dead.
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Reviews

March 2010

On the Quai at Smyrna

By Srdja Trifkovic

The literature in the English language on various long-established communities eradicated by the horrors of the 20th century is largely dominated by the Jewish holocaust.
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Vital Signs

March 2010

The New Yorker Under Glass

By Catharine Savage Brosman

The first issue of The New Yorker (February 21, 1925) showed on its cover a dandy in top hat, high collar, and morning suit gazing through his monocle at a butterfly. The drawing is reproduced yearly, and butterflies became a cover motif.
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Reviews

February 2010

Cicero's Legacy

By Matthew A. Roberts

Once a believer in the blessings of modernity and classical liberalism, Dutch philosopher Andreas Kinneging now considers himself a “convert” to traditional thinking.
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Reviews

January 2010

The Body's Vest

By Jonathan Chaves

Here, beyond question, is a milestone in American poetry. Although the Neo-Formalist movement has existed now for two or more decades, even this school has produced a great many works that, while formally polished, remain empty at their core.
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Vital Signs

November 2009

On the Death of Newspapers

By R. Clay Reynolds

This past week, word came to me that a close friend and book-review editor of a major daily newspaper had been laid off after 16 years of service. The book page, one of the nation’s best, would be reduced by half, and his “replacement” would be...
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Columns

September 2009

Christian No More

By Aaron D. Wolf

C.S. Lewis wrote about the “death of words.” In essence, he suggested that, whenever we feel compelled to append a noun with the adjectives true or real, it is safe to say that the noun has lost its meaning, or died. “No, no,...
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European Diary

September 2009

The Brazilian Cow

By Andrei Navrozov

In the middle of the 19th century, Sydney Dobell wrote a poem that contained the following line: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” This excursion into the absurd c. 1850 is readily recognized by readers of American poems or novels...
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View

August 2009

“Vampire-Loving Barmaid Hits Jackpot”

By James O. Tate

Well, of course you’re reading my compelling exposition because of its lapel-grabbing title, but did you notice that my title is in quotes? Oh, yes indeedy. That’s because I got the title from Motoko Rich’s article in the New York Times...
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Reviews

August 2009

Unnatural Causes

By Wayne Allensworth

“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.”
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Vital Signs

August 2009

How the Historical Novel Has Changed!

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Should one read Hervey Allen or Anne Rice? Why should the question be asked at all? Why might a discriminating reader today even think of picking up either Hervey Allen’s massive best-seller of 1933, Anthony Adverse, or The Feast of...
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Vital Signs

June 2009

Forgotten French

By Tony Outhwaite

Last October, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to French novelist J.M.G. Le Clézio, the 13th French writer to win since the award’s inauguration in 1901 and the first to win since avant-garde novelist Claude Simon in 1985.
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Reviews

February 2009

Homage To a Friend

By Tom Landess

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.”
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Reviews

February 2009

Homeric Lessons

By Matthew A. Roberts

“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.
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Reviews

February 2009

The Smoke of Satan

By Tom Piatak

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...
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Cultural Revolutions

January 2009

Irreplaceable Men

By Clyde Wilson

Chronicles, as the premier journal of real American culture, takes notice, though belatedly, of the loss of two great scholars of American literature. They were both admirers and faithful readers of this magazine, to which I had the...
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Reviews

November 2008

The Burden of History

By Thomas Fleming

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.
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Round Table Discussion

October 2008

The Journeys of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

By Wayne Allensworth

The journey is over. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn survived war, the Gulag, and cancer; was exiled from his homeland, only to return, having outlived the Soviet Union as he once predicted he would; and has died in his beloved Russia.
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Reviews

October 2008

G.K. Chesterton, Peacemaker

By Chris Chan

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...
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Biography

September 2008

George Garrett: 1929-2008

By Fred Chappell

A few years ago, an editor at The Oxford American telephoned to request that I write a piece for that journal about the Calder Willingham-Fred Chappell feud.
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Perspective

September 2008

Chinese Monkeys on Our Backs

By Thomas Fleming

An eminent British statesman once confessed to Horace Walpole that he had learned all he knew of the Wars of the Roses from reading Shakespeare’s histories. I do not recall who the statesman was, and I am only guessing that Walpole is the source...
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Reviews

September 2008

Perspectives on RPW

By Tom Landess

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.
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Reviews

September 2008

A Life in Literature

By Catharine Savage Brosman

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...
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Vital Signs

September 2008

Be Not Afraid

By Mark Shea

In Leviticus, God gives Israel a number of blessings and curses that describe the benefits and consequences of keeping (or failing to keep) the Sinai covenant. One of the “covenant curses” is curiously descriptive of the jittery culture of fear...
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Stories

July 2008

The Fortune Teller

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Two weeks before his wife announced her intention to sue for divorce and ten days before she moved out leaving him the furniture, the toy poodle, her wedding dress, and several pairs of worn-out shoes at the back of the closet, Samuel Adams...
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Reviews

July 2008

Seeing Clear

By Catharine Savage Brosman

X.J. Kennedy is admired for his great skill in treating contemporary topics in traditional forms and especially for his cultivation of light verse. Throughout the present book, Kennedy’s writing illustrates what almost every literate person...
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Reviews

June 2008

Give Us Your Coyotes

By Catharine Savage Brosman

From Aesop on, through Ovid, Chaucer, La Fontaine, and Dryden, to George Orwell, the genre of the animal fable (whether in verse or prose) has been useful to moralists and critics of human behavior.
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Reviews

May 2008

Print Lives!

By Clark Stooksbury

The first thing one notices about Print Is Dead is that it is, in fact, a stack of bound pieces of paper with words printed on them. The author, Jeff Gomez, notes the irony of this in his Introduction.
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View

April 2008

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be

By James O. Tate

I cannot remember the occasion, but I will not forget the voice—female, authoritative, and poised—that intoned a dismissal of the so-called yuppies as follows: “They oversee the distribution of toilet paper!”
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Perspective

April 2008

Little Aristocracies of Our Own

By Thomas Fleming

"How beastly the bourgeois is,/ Especially the male of the species." D.H. Lawrence’s lines are still quoted, though most often by writers who know nothing else of his poetry.
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Reviews

April 2008

Robert Frost: The Definitive Work

By Tom Landess

During much of the 20th century, Robert Frost was widely regarded as our greatest living poet. Yet the Frost poems that students used to read in college English classes were those more easily accessible: “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “Stopping by...
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Reviews

February 2008

Atheism

By Tom Piatak

Strange as it may sound, one of the best antidotes to the angry atheism of such disaffected Britons as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins is the recent science-fiction novel Eifelheim by Michael Flynn.
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Reviews

January 2008

Big Is Still Ahead

By Kirkpatrick Sale

This odd little book has a point to make—the title says it all—but it is a point that was made 34 years ago in a book that sold millions of copies and became famous around the world.
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Reviews

November 2007

Southwest Illuminations

By Mary Anne O'Neil

Range of Light, Catharine Savage Brosman’s sixth full-length collection of poetry, returns to the Southwest landscapes of the poet’s youth.
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Columns

October 2007

The New Math: 66 < 60

By Scott P. Richert

How much would you pay for a library card? In Rockford, if you are not a resident, you have to pay $140 per year for the privilege of using the Rockford Public Library system.
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Perspective

September 2007

Counting People and People Who Count

By Thomas Fleming

My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education.
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Reviews

September 2007

Cool Britannia Gothic

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Does the public get the books it wants? Publishers, in their own interest, make it their business to see to that, whether it is a question of chemistry text-books or novels.
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Correspondence

September 2007

Left Implosion

By Jason Jewell

A debate I attended at the Oxford Literary Festival highlighted growing tensions between classical Enlightenment thought and postmodernism—tensions that threaten to cause a fissure on the British left.
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European Diary

September 2007

Promises, Promises

By Andrei Navrozov

The world of pulp and prevarication, whose deluged plateau the young woman I was in love with had fled, called to mind a private letter of Pasternak’s written in the 1920’s.
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Letters to the Bishop

August 2007

Abysmal Answers

By Joe Ecclesia

In June, I began reading The Inferno. This is my first excursion into Danteland, as I like to call it. I intended to finish the entire work by summer’s end, but my progress is slow, in part because I keep dozing off.
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Reviews

August 2007

A Humble Love

By Derek Turner

John Betjeman’s evocative and educative television programs and his uniquely readable poetry have left an indelible image in the British public mind.
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Reviews

August 2007

Un Monstre étrange

By Catharine Savage Brosman

To translate a play by Corneille (1606-84), one of the “big three” dramatists (along with Racine and Molière) of the classical period in France, is to challenge most trends of contemporary American taste, starting with the reigning, and...
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View

July 2007

Portraits: Some Notes on the Poetry of Growing Old

By George Garrett

Years and years ago—it would have to have been in 1958-59, a year that my wife and I and our two young children were living in Rome—I wrote a little satirical poem about famous old poets and what’s to become of them.
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Reviews

July 2007

The Recovery of Metrical Verse

By David Middleton

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.
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Vital Signs

July 2007

The Enigmatic Professor Strauss, Part II

By Claude Polin

One can safely claim that Leo Strauss was an enigmatic man, since he prided himself on being enigmatic. He raised the art of double-talk to the dignity of a requisite for any serious philosophizing.
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Reviews

May 2007

An American Life

By Catharine Savage Brosman

It is not impossible, merely difficult, for the author of a highly praised first novel to produce a second worthy of its predecessor.
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Reviews

May 2007

The Better Way

By H.A. Scott Trask

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.
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Vital Signs

April 2007

A Great Tradition Renewed

By Derek Turner

Literary feuds, like ideas, have consequences. After Sir Walter Scott read a disparaging review of his Marmion in the Edinburgh Review, the bard of the Borders decided that what British life needed above all was a journal that would give...
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Reviews

March 2007

Imagining the Permanent Things

By Scott P. Richert

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 of that time by George A. Panichas.
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Reviews

January 2007

Carrying the Fire

By Jack Trotter

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 Cervantes, Austen, or Swift.
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Columns

November 2006

Aaron’s Tormentors

By Joseph Sobran

This summer, as the odious Barry Bonds advanced toward Henry Aaron’s home-run record, I told a friend: “I’m going to write Bonds a letter. And it’s going to be even more vitriolic than the one I wrote Aaron 30 years ago.”
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Reviews

November 2006

Agrarian Poetics

By Mark Royden Winchell

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...
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Perspective

October 2006

The Root of All Evil

By Thomas Fleming

When George Bernard Shaw decided to devote himself to the destruction of civilization (or, as he would have preferred to call it, the cause of socialism), he spent years studying political economy.
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Reviews

October 2006

Pictures Into Words

By Mark Royden Winchell

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.
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Columns

September 2006

Holmes & Sons

By Joseph Sobran

During a recent bout of infirmity, I turned for solace to the greatest storyteller of modern times, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). If this sounds like excessive praise, I ask you—no, I defy you—to name his superior, or even his nearest...
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Reviews

September 2006

In a Savage World

By Thomas Fleming

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.
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European Diary

September 2006

Sex and Poverty

By Andrei Navrozov

The poor smelled, and there was nothing to be done about it. “Middle-class people believe that the working class are dirty,” George Orwell recalled, “and, what is worse, that they are somehow inherently dirty.”
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Perspective

August 2006

Socialism Is Theft

By Thomas Fleming

The troubles of youth have long been a staple of popular fiction. In 19th-century fiction, wellborn young men borrowed against their future inheritance in order to pay for the wine, women, and song that red-blooded young men have always pursued.
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View

July 2006

O Literature, Thou Art Sick

By Catharine Savage Brosman

The present condition of literature (as that term is ordinarily understood), at least in America, is obviously unhealthy. Its illness is the result not only of internal undermining, “the invisible worm” of Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” but of...
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News

July 2006

Rendering Us Again in Affection

By Katherine Dalton

Wendell Berry is the author of over 40 books and has been writing about conservation, community, and the necessity of good farming for over four decades.
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Reviews

May 2006

The Way Home

By Bill Kauffman

Wendell Berry’s latest harvest of essays contains characteristically wise observations on mobility, industrial agriculture, and other maladies of our age, but it also displays a Berry seldom glimpsed—that is, Wendell Berry as a rural Kentucky...
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Reviews

April 2006

No Country for Anyone

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

The few reviews I’d read of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, including the lead in the New York Times Book Review, though laudatory, had little more to say than that No Country for Old Men would (will) make a terrific screenplay. So...
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Correspondence

February 2006

Return to Manor Farm

By Andrei Navrozov

The protagonist of a novel I’m now writing speaks in the voice of George Orwell, except that he uses the manly, tobacco-and-gin accents of reason, detachment, and persuasion to discuss love, rather than politics.
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Perspective

February 2006

Lost in Translation

By Thomas Fleming

In one of his earliest essays, Walker Percy expounded a theory of “Metaphor as Mistake,” and it is true that many insights, not all of them metaphorical, can arise from misunderstanding or, as happens to me more frequently these days, mishearing...
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Reviews

February 2006

Seasoned Travels

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Readers of Chronicles are familiar with Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s regular contributions under the title The Hundredth Meridian, a rubric launched in the 1990’s. The first two dozen or so of these columns were conceived as chapters in a...
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Correspondence

January 2006

The Mongrel Din

By Jack Trotter

This year marks the centennial of the publication of Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore, a comedy of manners about a wedding cake.
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Vital Signs

December 2005

An Enduring Feast

By Christopher Sandford

Some cult writers are admired more for what they mean than for what they accomplish. The works of the novelist, diarist, and prolific reviewer Anthony Powell (1905-2000) enjoyed only modest commercial success.
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View

December 2005

The Romantic Reaction

By Joseph Pearce

In the Afterword to the third edition of The Pilgrim's Regress, C.S. Lewis argued that Romanticism had acquired so many different meanings that it had become meaningless. "I would not now use this word . . . to describe anything," he complained.
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View

November 2005

Reattacking Leviathan

By Mark Royden Winchell

In 1989, Russell Kirk recalled browsing through the library at Michigan State College as an “earnest sophomore” over 50 years earlier. It was there that he happened upon Donald Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan.
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View

September 2005

The Autodidact at Work and Play

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Every writer is an autodidact, for reasons that are fairly obvious when you think about it. First, the business of writing (as distinguished from composition) cannot be taught but must be learned by imitation and by practice.
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View

September 2005

Confessions of an Autodidact

By David Gordon

In what follows, I shall recommend a few books that I have found valuable and then offer some suggestions on how to analyze critically what you are reading.
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Reviews

August 2005

Raisonné Dérèglement

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Whether all authorities agree with what is averred here—that Ernest Hemingway was one of America’s greatest writers—is uncertain. Surely, however, his work constituted a watershed; if his chastened style and objective manner no longer seem...
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Reviews

July 2005

Play It Again, Plum!

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Robert McCrum demurs from critical comparisons of P.G. Wodehouse with the great English writers, including Shakespeare and Dickens, arguing that “Wodehouse is a miniaturist and his work is not like theirs.
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Reviews

July 2005

A Dirge Transposed

By Catharine Savage Brosman

“A novel,” wrote Stendhal, “is a mirror carried along a road.” In Cyn-thia Shearer’s new book, the road, literally speaking, is that between the invented town of Madagascar, Mississippi, where the action is centered, and Memphis, the other major...
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Reviews

June 2005

Citizen Faulkner

By Clyde Wilson

If we wish to understand and profit from a great artist, the essential thing to grasp is his vision, as unfolded in his work. Much less important is something that, unlike the God-given vision, he shares with all of us—his opinions.
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Reviews

June 2005

Metaphoric Angels

By Catharine Savage Brosman

Richard Wilbur’s long and distinguished writing career demonstrates that a poet can go against literary fashions, shunning what passes for received wisdom, and still earn critical praise and become an important figure on the literary landscape.
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View

March 2005

The Abolition of Learning

By Michael McMahon

In 1997, the headmaster of the English secondary school in which I was teaching ordered a bibliocaust. The inspectors were coming, and he wanted our library to look up-to-date.
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March 2005

Music, Technology, and Psychological Warfare

By E. Michael Jones

The late Sam Shapiro used to tell a story about two Englishmen in China who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their culture to one of the mandarins they had met.
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March 2005

Man and Everyman

By Joseph Pearce

The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis’s masterful critique of the relativism that was as rampant in his day as it is in ours, represented the culmination of the author’s quest for the quintessential meaning of man’s being and purpose.
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Reviews

March 2005

Beautiful Terror

By James O. Tate

The face is familiar, but not the gray hair. To some few, it may be so from Our Gang shorts from the late 30’s and early 40’s, known by the moniker of Mickey Gubitosi.
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Reviews

March 2005

Playing Poetry With a Net

By Mark Royden Winchell

In the Introduction to his classic anthology of Fugitive verse, William Pratt writes: “Modern American poetry abounds in individualism, but two groups of poets have affected its course profoundly.”
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Reviews

March 2005

Room to Pass

By Patrick J. Walsh

Few people read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) much anymore. Lines from his poems were once on the tips of tongues the world over. Students used to memorize “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” and lines from “Evan-geline” and “Hiawatha.”
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Round Table Discussion

February 2005

The Remnant’s Library

By Thomas Fleming

Chilton Williamson has taken an important step toward giving postmodern conservatism a set of respectable literary credentials.
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Reviews

February 2005

The Peculiar Path

By Paul Gottfried

A Bavarian legal scholar who has been attached to the U.N. Secretariat and to the E.U. Commission in Brussels, Josef Schüsslburner has disagreements with the German Basic Law, enacted in 1949 as an interim constitution for the West German Federal...
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News

January 2005

First Prize, Second Hand, Third Rate

By James O. Tate

With difficulty, in a diminished capacity, or perhaps with an alienated attitude because I was watching good old Benny Hill reruns on the BBC America channel at the time, I have become somehow dimly aware that prizes have been awarded to someone...
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December 2004

At Home in the Cosmos

By John Francis Nieto

Nelson Head, a boy in a story by Flannery O’Connor, is reared in the rural South, with little sign of education and in obvious isolation. Yet the boy is arrogant to the point of impudence, because he was born in the city.
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Reviews

December 2004

Daffodils for Wordsworth

By Patrick J. Walsh

The name Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is a wonderfully poetic one, conjuring an image of a lover of horses on a carefree adventure.
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Reviews

September 2004

Dropping the Masks

By Sean P. Dailey

The 1997 movie Wilde opens with a shot of Oscar Wilde (played by Stephen Fry) being lowered by bucket into a Colorado silver mine, where he recites his poetry and chats with shirtless, sweaty miners, who are obviously thrilled at a visit...
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Reviews

August 2004

A Living Library of the Law Revived

By Stephen B. Presser

Whatever the mess his personal life may have been, Sir Edward Coke's professional accomplishments were the stuff of immortality.
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Reviews

July 2004

Russell Kirk and the Negation of Ideology

By Scott P. Richert

Though ten years have passed since his death on April 29, 1994, Russell Kirk has yet to be the subject of a definitive intellectual biography.
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Reviews

June 2004

As Long as I’m Doing It

By James O. Tate

Writing—literary creation in the fullness of the sense that we have known it in the previous century and even in the one before, from the French and Russian masters, the daft Irish, the mad Yankees, the haunted Southerners (and from elsewhere, of...
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Reviews

June 2004

Till Earth Was

By Patrick J. Walsh

Poet John Clare (1793-1864) seems to have grown from the soil. His last name derives from the word clayer—someone who manures and enriches clay. As a farm laborer, he drew sustenance from the earth.
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Reviews

April 2004

Custom and Ceremony

By Patrick J. Walsh

The first volume of R.F. Foster’s acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats (The Apprentice Mage) appeared in 1997. Yeats’ son and daughter (now in their 70’s) chose him to be their father’s official biographer after their previous...
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Reviews

January 2004

Letting the Catholic Out of the Baggins

By Joseph Pearce

In the United Kingdom, back in 1997, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was voted “the greatest book of the twentieth century” in several major polls, emerging as a runaway winner ahead of its nearest rival, Orwell’s 1984.
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Vital Signs

November 2003

Making the Whole

By Marian Kester Coombs

As a race, the British are considered neither the most intellectual nor the most artistic, Britain’s role in the invention of modern physics (Newton) and modern painting (Turner) notwithstanding.
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Reviews

October 2003

My Ground, Myself

By Katherine Dalton

To a woman who has spent several decades of her life in New Orleans, a city that lies mostly below sea level, any trip out is a journey to higher ground.
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Reviews

October 2003

Superior Fiction

By Thomas Fleming

One of the pleasures of fiction is the opportunity that novels, short stories, and epic poems give us to escape from our own everyday world into an alien world of gods and heroes (as in the Iliad) or knights and wizards (Tennyson’s Idylls),...
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Columns

October 2003

Lies and More Lies

By Paul Gottfried

Having come across several references this spring to a French literary critic, Jean Sévillia, who is criticizing leftist historical reconstructions, I read his two most recent books, Le Terrorisme Intellectuel (2000) and...
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September 2003

Sophocles’ Antigone

By Peter Gemma, Mary Lefkowitz

Sophocles’ Antigone is a drama about a young woman who defies orders because she believes them to be wrong. Her uncle Creon, the ruler of Thebes, had proclaimed that no one was to give the rites of burial to Antigone’s brother...
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Perspective

September 2003

Back to Reality

By Thomas Fleming

In the official version of modernity, Aristotle was a false idol overthrown by brave men seeking the truth. In reality, Aristotle never intended to set up a reigning ideology; his whole method of patient accumulation of fact and careful analysis...
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Reviews

September 2003

If It Ain’t Broke . . .

By Thomas Fleming

Greek teachers are frequently asked which text they recommend for introductory Greek. Although many new textbooks have come along since 1928, when An Introduction to Greek by Henry Crosby and John Schaeffer was first published, none has...
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Reviews

August 2003

Nothing Is Dead

By James O. Tate

Since she died in 1964 at the age of 39, Flannery O’Connor has not receded from literary awareness nor from a larger consciousness we might call philosophical or spiritual or religious.
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Correspondence

August 2003

A Northern Light

By Andrei Navrozov

Living in Italy, as I have done for some years, may result in an incremental loss of the vivid sensation, in my view all but indispensable in a writer, that the world as a whole is a barbarous place.
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Reviews

June 2003

Sublime Misrule

By Catharine Savage Brosman

X.J. Kennedy can be said almost to be a popular literary figure. (A New Jersey native, Joseph Charles Ken-nedy, born in 1929, adopted his pen name upon settling in Massachusetts.)
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Reviews

May 2003

MacArthur Park Is Melting in the Dark

By James O. Tate

Now, before I have my say about David L. Ulin’s new compendium of writing on Los Angeles, there are just a few things that need to be said about my own “Hollywood years,” because I get tired of being asked about that episode by nosy people who...
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Reviews

May 2003

Agonies of Intrigue

By Jeffery Meyers

Lord Byron was the most fascinating literary figure of the 19th century. Fiona MacCarthy’s solid and competent biography covers the ground in great detail (the deformed foot, the scandalous exile, the endless wandering, the early death in...
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Reviews

April 2003

The Virtues of Dorothy Parker

By Lawrence Dugan

Literary biography is often an opaque filter for the work of modern writers. The interference comes not so much from the cockeyed analysis we may encounter of an artist’s life but from the mass of irrelevant detail.
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Columns

March 2003

Be Afraid of Virginia Woolf

By George McCartney

“CAUTION: Reading Virginia Woolf may be hazardous to your health.” This warning should be slapped on Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours and its film adaptation by Stephen Daldry.
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December 2002

My Hometown

By Aaron D. Wolf

Saint Augustine did not originally desire to be a pastor. When, in 387, he finally surrendered to the Holy Ghost in the garden of his “philosophers’ estate” in the countryside outside Milan, he intended to follow the example of Saint Anthony and...
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June 2002

Petrarch’s The Ascent of Mount Ventoux

At the time fixed we left the house, and by evening reached Malaucene, which lies at the foot of the mountain, to the north. Having rested there a day, we finally made the ascent this morning, with no companions except two servants; and a most...
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Reviews

May 2002

Ho, Ho, Ho, and a Bottle of Fun

By James O. Tate

For the fifth time, Señor Pérez-Reverte, the Spanish novelist and international journalist, has presented “a novel of suspense” that adheres to his formula, and this may be his best yet, or at least his longest.
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Reviews

May 2002

Words Like Quartz

By Paul Lake

If even a rough correspondence between poetic accomplishment and public reputation existed in America today, R.S. Gwynn would be one of our most widely read and highly honored poets.
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Columns

April 2002

Chesterton and the Gentile Problem

By Joseph Sobran

In 1961, Garry Wills published his first book, a penetrating study of G.K. Chesterton. It wasn’t a huge success, and it soon went out of print.
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Reviews

December 2001

Frankly, My Dear

By James O. Tate

The publication of Gone With the Wind in 1936 was a major event in publishing—if not literary—history, compounded by the overblown movie of 1939 and by worldwide sales that continue to this day.
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Reviews

November 2001

The Boys in the Back Room

By James O. Tate

If you are looking for literary reflections or information about the intentions of the author of Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Class Key, forget about it. There is precious little of that in Dasthell...
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Reviews

November 2001

A Life in Sketches

By Bill Croke

If Nevada can be said to have a first family equivalent to the Kennedys of Massachusetts, that family is the Laxalts. This immigrant Basque clan of a century's residence has given America a U.S. senator (Paul Laxalt, now retired) and a poet...
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Reviews

August 2001

Prince of Painters

By Jeffery Meyers

Titian, the greatest painter of the Venetian Renaissance, was born about 1488 in Pieve di Cadoro, in the foothills of the Dolomites. He came down to Venice at the age of nine and was apprenticed to the workshops of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini.
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June 2001

Put a Lid on It

By James O. Tate

How often we must reflect today that the salt hath lost its savor. At a "reading" at Queens College not long ago, I saw and heard Norman Mailer reading "poems" to his audience. He showed all the innocent delight of a child, and he was well received.
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Reviews

June 2001

Becoming George Orwell

By George McCartney

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, India, where his father worked for the Indian Civil Service as a sub-deputy opium agent in charge of manufacturing the narcotic for transport to China.
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May 2001

Rome As You Find It

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

For Englishmen, the Roman Forum was nearly as much a part of their political heritage as the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Since Colonial America was a part of British culture, educated American colonists shared in the British reverence...
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Perspective

May 2001

Two Rooms With a View

By Thomas Fleming

It has been the usual 56-hour day spent in airports under siege from CNN and microwave-burned pizza, cramped into buses, taxis, and the midget seats of American Airlines steerage with two varieties of undrinkable wine-product to wash down the...
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Reviews

May 2001

English Tracts

By Derek Turner

For the last 300 years, "England" and "Britain" have been largely synonymous. When Glasgow-born General Sir John Moore lay dying at Corunna, his last words were "I hope the people of England will be satisfied.
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Reviews

May 2001

Two Between the Ribs

By Clyde Wilson

How does he get away with it? Ever since Bonfire of the Vanities, I have wondered at Tom Wolfe's success. The success itself is well deserved: Wolfe is a dazzling writer, without peer as an observer of contemporary American life.
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Reviews

May 2001

I Am Not Ashamed Either

By James O. Tate

Ever since the cinéaste Nino Frank first used the term in France in 1946 (he never said he invented it), there has been considerable controversy about the meaning of "film noir" and various attempts to define it, some more or less authoritative.
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Reviews

May 2001

The Janus Faces of War

By Paul Gottfried

A. D. Harvey's study of art and war, while noting the suffering caused by the European wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, highlights the artistic and spiritual creativity released by these struggles.
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Reviews

March 2001

No Place Like Home

By Randall Ivey

Fred Chappell's Family Gathering, his first book of poems since 1995's Spring Garden: New and Selected Work, is a collection of short verse portraits that allows Chappell to display his considerable gifts for miniature (a talent...
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Reviews

March 2001

The Way Forward Is With a Broken Head

By James O. Tate

Symptoms: Health fine until reads Walker latest. Immediate somatic distress of all systems inch pulmonary; digestive crisis, upper, middle, and lower; cardiac irregularity; low and high blood pressure; skin rashes and lesions; emerging...
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Vital Signs

February 2001

The Ax, the Scythe, and the Pen

By Bruce Guernsey

As we speed along the information highway at the close of one millennium and the beginning of another, it might be wise to stop for a moment, if not by woods on a snowy evening, at least at the next rest area.
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Cultural Revolutions

December 2000

Causing a Stir

By Aaron D. Wolf

The Onion caused quite a stir a couple of weeks ago when it was read by an unsuspecting Christian.
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Reviews

November 2000

Frankenstein's Children

By George McCartney

In 1974, I first encountered one of the creatures E. Michael Jones writes about in Monsters From the Id. It appeared in the guise of one of my graduate-school classmates. She was a bright, pretty woman who seemed unusually self-possessed and...
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Reviews

November 2000

Poetry in Ploughing

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Totally innocent of the myth of progress and the scandal of death and failure that account for modern sentimentality in its most wrongheaded and obnoxious form, Set the Ploughshare Deep is as realistic a work as a novel by Thomas Hardy or the Old...
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Reviews

September 2000

Obscurely Called: Richard Wilbur at Eighty

By Alan Sullivan

Now nearly 80 years of age, Richard Wilbur has recently published "Mayflies", a new book of poems and translations.
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Reviews

August 2000

Escape From Gotham

By Edward B. Anderson

Woiwode's time in North Dakota has been spent mostly on the business of living, but he has done some good writing as well.
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Reviews

August 2000

On Her Way

By Jane Greer

The new book's premise is intriguing. It's 1961. Elderly Scottish professor Georgina Fletcher leaves an Oxford pub with a tall, argumentative American.
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Reviews

June 2000

Hell Man

By James O. Tate

Though famous as a melodrama, The Maltese Falcon has not yet completely received its due as a composition, as a poem made out of words.
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Reviews

June 2000

The Displaced Person

By Jeffery Meyers

"The depravity of Tiberius, or the salacity of Suetonius," wrote Anthony Burgess, "had left its mark on an island all sodomy, lesbianism, scandal and cosmopolitan artiness."
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Perspective

April 2000

The Art of Creation An Interview With Dean Koontz

By Thomas Fleming

G.K. Chesterton was an avid reader of popular fiction, particularly the so-called "penny dreadfuls," whose everyday morality and concentration on plot and character made them more wholesome reading than the pretentious productions of modernist...
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April 2000

Storytellers and Fakers

By Tony Outhwaite

A writer, asked during a literary party what her new novel was about, turned on the questioner with an expression combining irritation, indignation, and pity, and replied, "My novels aren't about things!"
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April 2000

Literary Worth and Popular Taste

By R. Clay Reynolds

As an academic trained in the study and appreciation of literature, I have spent the better part of my life staunchly defending the ramparts of literary endeavor against the slings and arrows of outrageous pop-fiction lovers.
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Reviews

April 2000

The Trybe of Yvor

By R.S. Gwynn

Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's remembrance of his first day in class with a professor who—if his stubborn presence in the work of several generations of students and now even the students of those students is any measure—must have been one of the...
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Reviews

April 2000

Freud With Teeth

By Andrei Navrozov

With author's fees in eight figures and print runs to match, Thomas Harris's cannibal is what publishers call a phenomenon. "I should've written that!" agonize America's ambitious housewives on their way to becoming failed writers.
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Reviews

April 2000

Reflections in Print

By John Attarian

Henry Regnery (1912-1996), as Jeffrey Nelson observes in his introduction, was "one of the unsung heroes of the last half-century of American cultural life."
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Reviews

April 2000

The Newspaper West

By Bill Croke

In Flint's Honor, Richard Wheeler has painted a realistic portrait of life in a Colorado mining town, with special emphasis on the importance of newspapers in the civic life of the frontier West.
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Vital Signs

April 2000

The Golden Goose: A Recollection

By Robert Beum

In the bright, warm autumn of 1947 that followed a chilly summer, several hundred bewildered 17-year-olds found the Ohio State University campus in Columbus swarming with an alien and formidable species: veterans.
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Reviews

March 2000

Best of British Conservatism

By Derek Turner

British conservative circles are awash with books at the moment. Apart from the usual think-tank reports and surveys, we have seen recently John Major's and Norman Lamont's memoirs, John Redwood's Death of Britain, and the latest...
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Reviews

February 2000

Waugh Stories

By George McCartney

Two vignettes illustrate Evelyn Waugh's character. One has to do with art; the other, protocol. In 1951, Evelyn Waugh commissioned a painting depicting the interior of a plane's cabin.
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Cultural Revolutions

January 2000

A Running Gag

By Thomas Fleming

The Nobel Peace Prize is by now a running gag—or rather a running sore. Like the Prize for Literature, given nearly every year to an untalented anti-writer as obscure in his own country as he is in the rest of the world, the Peace Prize is...
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Reviews

December 1999

Our Time

By Bill Croke

In a regional literary world ripe with poseurs, Ivan Doig may be the true descendant of Wallace Stegner.
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Reactionary Radicals

November 1999

The Militia of Love

By Bill Kauffman

Snow Man follows Robert Drummond, a hairy and occasionally abominable patriot, a Maine militiaman who is between assassinations, as it were.
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Vital Signs

November 1999

Wisconsin Apocalypse

By William Mills

Since I was going to fish in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, I decided like any bookish person to read some books about the place. I expect I own all of Gordon Weaver's ten or twelve books, and I went digging through them again to sec which ones...
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Reviews

October 1999

Chicken Soup Starring: The Marx Bros.

By James O. Tate

There is something compelling in reading about spies and something compelling as well about spying, or we would not have so many spies to read about, fictional or not.
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Reviews

October 1999

New West Gothic

By Bill Croke

The American short story is moribund. The passing of giants has relegated the form to the purgatory of academic hackdom and its innumerable ideological ax-grinders paying homage to a plethora of multicultural grievances.
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Reviews

September 1999

M.E. Bradford and the Barbarism of Reflection

By Donald Livingston

This is the first critical study of M.E. Bradford, whose untimely death in 1993 silenced the most eloquent voice ever raised on behalf of the permanent things as they are revealed in the Southern tradition.
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Reviews

September 1999

En Garde!

By James O. Tate

There's a confusion here between image and reality, between money and politics, that's often referred to as "the publishing industry," which exists in parallel to "the fashion industry," "the film industry," "the music business," "politics,"...
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Reviews

June 1999

Invaders of Our Land

By Charles Edward Eaton

Wendell Berry is, without doubt, the poetic star of environmentalism. I do not know of any other poet of his stature in the present or past who has taken his stand, as the Agrarians said they did, and stood by it so steadfastly into his 60's.
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Correspondence

April 1999

Me and Mecosta: Studying With Russell Kirk

By Michael Jordan

Russell Kirk played a prominent role in founding and promoting modern conservatism in America—not neoconservatism, but the more traditional variety which emphasizes culture and tradition more than political programs and economics.
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Reviews

March 1999

Mauve Gloves & Stoics, Thackeray, Wolfe

By Andrei Navrozov

When Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities came out in England more than a decade ago, I reviewed it in the Times with that special elation obscure Soviet dissidents once reserved for their brethren mentioned by name at disarmament conferences...
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Vital Signs

March 1999

A.D. Hope: Poet of the Antipodes

By Alan Sullivan

The other day, as I was reading an article about Keats, I thought suddenly of A.D. Hope. I started imagining a time when young writers would lose interest in the romance of a vivid English youth extinguished by early death.
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Reviews

February 1999

Ah, Wilderness!

By Scott McConnell

Having written books on the Balkans (Balkan Ghosts) and the most disorganized parts of Africa (The Ends of the Earth), Robert Kaplan, contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly, has turned his eye on the western half of North America.
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Reviews

January 1999

The Lady From Niger

By William Hawkins

Christopher Patten warns at the start that his engagingly written book is not a memoir. Though the core of it deals with the author's tenure as the British Empire's final governor of Hong Kong (1992-1997), Patten employs an impressionistic and...
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Reviews

November 1998

Experiencing Civilization

By Brian Robertson

In the home, away from the scientific model that permeates our Deweyized, politically correct classrooms, young children can experience the thrill and wonder of discovering our common cultural heritage in the company and under the direction of...
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Reviews

November 1998

Scorched Earth

By Thomas Fleming

The great debate over the humanities curriculum is the one that never took place. What some disgruntled academics call "the traditional curriculum" is really the hopeless hodgepodge that was cobbled together in the period that stretches, roughly...
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Reviews

November 1998

Georgics on My Mind

By R.S. Gwynn

"Farmer-poet" is one of those hyphenated epithets that summons up a vision, and for most readers of American poetry that vision is embodied by Robert Frost, who, the legend has it, turned out memorable poems in spare moments stolen from...
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Reviews

October 1998

Poetry Now

By George Garrett

Fred Chappell's A Way of Happening is a gathering of some 17 critical pieces, together with an important personal essay about teaching writing and an essay-length introduction, published between 1985 and 1997, all but three written expressly for...
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Reviews

September 1998

Greatheart!

By Mark Royden Winchell

In the foreword to Brother to Dragons , Robert Penn Warren writes "historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living,...
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Reviews

September 1998

A Generous Man

By Charles Edward Eaton

One of the most important things to say about George Garrett is that his is a generous talent, not limited or confined by a narrow point of view. It is as though he has been searching for the meaning of life in many ways and modes of expression,...
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Reviews

August 1998

Beautiful Afternoons

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

"You have been writing," the author's alter ego tells him at the conclusion of this book, "about the decline not of the West but of the Anglo-American upper class."
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Reviews

August 1998

Against the Racketeers

By Paul Gottfried

In January and April, Wistrich—a highly polemical writer with few scholarly accomplishments—castigated Lindemann in Commentary as an apologist for anti-Semites and Cambridge University for putting "its imprint on so biased and ignominious a work."
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Reviews

August 1998

The Leading Man

By Frank Brownlow

On June 16,1956, Ted Hughes married Sylvia Plath in London. He was a recent graduate of Cambridge University, working for the J. Arthur Rank Organization; she, a Smith College graduate at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship.
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Reviews

July 1998

A Good Thing Not to Do

By Edward B. Anderson

The announcement in February 1997 that British scientists had cloned a sheep turned the medical world upside down, Ian Wilmut and his colleagues had taken cells from an adult sheep's udder and removed the nucleus from each.
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Reviews

June 1998

The Pleasurable Science

By Justin Raimondo

Is it a law of physics, or of human nature, that frequently dooms genius to obscurity during its lifetime? While every nonentity has his 15 minutes of fame, anything more enduring seems governed by a simple principle: death precedes recognition.
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Reviews

June 1998

Paleo Prophets

By James O. Tate

The 12 Southerners who contributed to I'll Take My Stand (1930) must have been a terrible failure, for the South as well as the rest of the nation ignored their warnings and injunctions.
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May 1998

A Hothouse of Goofiness: The American Book Industry

By Tony Outhwaite

The renowned American jazzman Charlie Parker, introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre in a Paris club during the 1949 jazz festival, reportedly said, "I'm very glad to have met you, Mr. Sartre. I like your playing very much."
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Perspective

May 1998

Dial M for Murdoch

By Thomas Fleming

Publishers and writers are inveterate enemies. It is a combat decreed by nature, like the eternal war between dogs and cats, oil and vinegar, teenage girls and their mothers.
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May 1998

Maxwell Perkins Is Dead: The Decline of Commercial Publishing

By R. Clay Reynolds

In an industry that trades on rumors of disaster, the tales flying around New York (which I use here as a synecdoche for major publishing houses anywhere) for the past several years are horrendous.
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May 1998

Reading and Weeping

By George Garrett

Tony Outhwaite's article pretty much says it all, a whole lot of it anyway, about the present state of American publishing. And he's not only right on the money, he's seriously funny, which is a pleasure for the reader and a problem for the...
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May 1998

God and Mammon in Christian Publishing

By Gene Edward Veith

That one can find Christian bookstores in nearly every shopping mall is doubtless a good sign. While our intellectual and cultural establishments refuse to factor God into their equations, there is an alternative network of publishing houses and...
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May 1998

The Unscholarly World of Scholarly Publishing

By Gregory McNamee

The days, golden for a certain breed of academic, are long past when university presses served as printers for on-campus scholars—who would, the legend has it, drop off a manuscript on some abstruse subject and return some months later to pick up...
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Reviews

May 1998

Over My Dead Body

By James O. Tate

These two volumes of crime novels, bound and printed as classics, challenge our notion of the American canon. Or perhaps they simply remind us of what we were actually reading when we were supposed to be reading something else.
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Reviews

April 1998

The Last Gentlemen

By Loxley Nichols

Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 7, 1916, the eldest son of a prosperous lawyer and a Georgia socialite. In addition to patrician lineage, Percy enjoyed a birthright of wealth and privilege.
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Reviews

April 1998

Shifting Sands

By Wayne Allensworth

The grand theme of P.D. James's work is man and his overwhelming sense of rootlessness, anxiety, and guilt in the knowledge of a crime unknown and a punishment outwardly denied in the post-Christian era, though inwardly anticipated.
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Vital Signs

March 1998

A Future for Critical Theory?

By George Watson

A questionnaire about future needs recently sent to a department of literature provoked at least one interesting reply: "We do not need a new post in Critical Theory. Theory is Old Hat."
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Reviews

December 1997

A Picturesque, Unprofitable Craft

By Mark Royden Winchell

If poetry once seemed central to civilization, it has now gone the way of opera and ballet, becoming the property of an insular subculture.
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Reviews

December 1997

A Life in Themes

By Frank Brownlow

By any assessment, W.B. Yeats was an extraordinary man who led a more active and varied life than most poets.
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Reviews

November 1997

Playback

By James O. Tate

The recent death of Robert Mitchum reminds us not only of his appearance in one of the best film noirs. Out of the Past, but of his impersonation of the detective Philip Marlowe in the remake of Farewell, My Lovely and The Big...
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Vital Signs

November 1997

The Black Nationalism of George S. Schuyler

By Nicholas Stix

Decisions, decisions. Such is the life of a black man in America today. Whether to be a black nationalist, a black Muslim, an Afrocentrist, or simply a color-blind Christian—a.k.a. an "Oreo," a traitor to the black race. Such choices are not new;...
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Vital Signs

November 1997

Robert Penn Warren Remembered

By Timothy Murphy

Reading Joseph Blotner's biography revives my memories of Robert Penn Warren. I was summoned to his rooms at Silliman College on September 5, 1969. I was a freckled, red-haired 18-year-old in whom he may have seen an apparition from his past.
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Vital Signs

November 1997

Belated Bloomsday

By Patrick J. Walsh

June 16 is Bloomsday, named after the character of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce's huge book takes place all on that long June day in 1904—250,000 words long, that is. We are told that Ulysses is one of the most important books of...
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September 1997

The Education of Everyman

By William F. Wyatt

Classical professors looked forward with a mixture of eagerness and anxiety to the recent $40 million version of the Odyssey on NBC. Would the production reveal Homer, or would the Hollywoodification of his poem so distort the plot that we would...
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Reviews

August 1997

A Bard, By Any Other Name . . .

By Frank Brownlow

Story-telling is a feature of all societies. If the world is to make sense, if we are to live together in families, cities, nations, if we are to do our daily work, if life is to be livable at all, we must tell each other stories.
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Reviews

August 1997

A Meeting of Equals

By James Scruton

A poet's critical prose holds interest for many people. Scholars examine it for clarifications or contradictions of the poet's verse, admiring readers for echoes of the language that captivated them in the poetry, to which students and new...
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May 1997

Science Fiction, R.I.P.

By Thomas F. Bertonneau

To register the obituary long after the fact: science fiction is dead. Aficionados of the genre who acquired their taste for it in the 1950's and 60's probably already know this. What they might not know is that the death of science fiction has...
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May 1997

Our Phildickian World

By Jesse Walker

Those of us who spent the 1980's trying to explain our affection for this pulp writer no one else had heard of, this author of surreal science fictions and bleak realistic novels, have watched both pop culture and the academy discover and embrace...
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May 1997

Us vs. Them

By Scott P. Richert

They live in the town, but they have no control over it. For three years, their lives have been at the mercy of shadowy aliens who have slowly destroyed the community, forcing its citizens to work for their enrichment. Parents fear that their...
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Reviews

May 1997

At the Heart of Darkness

By Samuel Francis

S.T. Joshi begins his mammoth biographical study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft by quoting his subject's reaction to a suggestion from a fan that he write his autobiography.
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Reviews

May 1997

Bookman's Holiday

By Gregory McNamee

Saint Ambrose, the reputed author of the Athanasian Creed, did not move his lips when he read. Neither did Ambrose's pupil and colleague Saint Augustine.
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Vital Signs

May 1997

August Derleth and Arkham House

By Peter Ruber

August Derleth was one of the principal forces that established science fiction as a legitimate literary genre. He was a product of the "pulp" era, who founded a unique publishing company in 1939 called Arkham House.
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Vital Signs

February 1997

John O'Hara and American Conservatism

By Ralph De Toledano

I have more than a suspicion that John O'Hara's novels and stories will persist, if only because they have something to say about the commedia that is life and death, and his record of what part of America was like in the 20th century, even after...
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Vital Signs

February 1997

George Gissing in Rome

The Greek and Roman classics had a great influence on George Gissing, not least because the literature and history of antiquity provided him with a kind of refuge from the grim realities of the modern industrial and commercial world.
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Perspective

September 1996

Battles of the Books

By Thomas Fleming

Ours is not the first age to have experienced a struggle for curriculum. On the contrary. There has never been a time in the past 150 years when the progressives have not been chipping away and undermining what had been a coherent classical...
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September 1996

Invisible but Present

By Zbigniew Herbert

I could not adequately acknowledge the greatest poet of the 20th century. An attempt to do so would quickly slip into banality. Instead, let me tell you about my encounters with T.S. Eliot.
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September 1996

The Portable Shakespeare

By George Garrett

Nothing new here, really. Nothing that hasn't been hashed and rehashed by my betters, the true scholars and critics whose faithful quest for knowledge has sometimes ended in earned wisdom for all of us.
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September 1996

The Unbanable Book

By Harold O.J. Brown

A recent full-page advertisement in the Chicago Tribune, which no longer calls itself "The World's Greatest Newspaper," listed four documents that supposedly are foundational: the Magna Carta, the Treaty of Versailles, the Declaration of...
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Reviews

September 1996

Indispensable Petrarch

By Thomas Fleming

By far the greater part of the Canzoniere, however, is devoted to his unconsummated love for Laura. But for Petrarch, love was closer to Christian cartias than to sexual desire, and even before her death his love poems take on an increasingly...
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Reviews

September 1996

Hard Lives, Hard Times

By Gregory McNamee

The life of country people, the Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry has observed, is marked by a surprising complexity. To be successful it requires deep knowledge of the land, of the seasons in their time, of plants and animals.
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Vital Signs

September 1996

New Criticism, Old Values

By William Pratt

It was in 1942 that John Crowe Ransom coined the phrase "The New Criticism" by publishing a book under that title, a book about the most respected literary critics of the first half of the century, notably T.S. Eliot, LA. Richards, William...
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Reviews

August 1996

It^s All Too Beautiful

By Thomas Fleming

Lock up your daughters, draw the blinds, and check your house for bugs and hidden cameras. George Garrett has put on his cap and bells again, and every page of his new book constitutes a thought crime against the stupid hypocrisies on which the...
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Reviews

August 1996

The Late Unpleasantness

By Katherine Dalton

There is nothing so painfully ironic as a war between countrymen. So when nurse Kate Cumming speaks bitterly in her 1864 diary of "our kind northern friends, who love us so dearly that they will have us unite with them, whether we will or no" it...
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Reviews

July 1996

The Language of Literature

By Thomas Fleming

That Johnson is among the greatest poets to write in English, no one would maintain; that he is among the wisest, no sensible reader would deny.
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Vital Signs

July 1996

Conrad Aiken

By Ralph De Toledano

I was to meet Cap Pearce at his office at 12:30, for discussion of a book contract and for one of our lunches at a small Italian restaurant in the East Thirties where the veal scallopini was well pounded and the wine muscular.
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Cultural Revolutions

July 1996

Christopher Hitchens & Vanity Fair

By Theodore Pappas

Christopher Hitchens and Vanity Fair get the Connie Chung Award for May. "Thanks for your help," read the letter inserted in my complimentary copy of the May issue of Vanity Fair. It seemed like a polite gesture, a pat on the head for sharing my...
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Reviews

May 1996

Swimming Against the Tide

By William Mills

Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of the 1991 T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, has fashioned a provocative symmetry in this memoir. He writes of growing up in Peru and Bolivia, bringing his life up to the point where he leaves for Europe at...
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Reviews

May 1996

Shakespeare, A Closet Catholic?

By M.D. Aeschliman

For the ongoing revolution against traditional authority it is often difficult to know whom to blame the most, but certainly the academic community's skepticism, suspicion, and mockery of traditional values is one cause.
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Reviews

March 1996

The Long Hello

By James O. Tate

Though Raymond Chandler himself saw to it that he exploited his power in the movies and on radio and television, he knew very well that his appeal rested on a literary achievement.
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Reviews

February 1996

The Mad Farmer

By Alan Cornett

In his latest book, Berry proves that the tradition, though too often ignored today, is alive and well. He has been farming and writing in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for 30 years now.
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Reviews

February 1996

Brief Mentions

By Michael Washburn

W.H. Auden is famous for poems about totalitarian evil, but he also wrote frivolous verse when in the mood. In assembling As I Walked Out One Evening, Edward Mendelson, the executor of Auden's estate, sifted through the vast corpus of his work,...
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Vital Signs

January 1996

Kiddy Lit for the 90's

By Herbert London

Children's books used to relate tales of heroes and villains. They presented a Manichaean world in which good triumphed over evil. Children might be scared, but they were assured that the forces of light could easily be distinguished from the...
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Reviews

December 1995

The End of Time

By Loxley Nichols

In his last novel, In the Tennessee Country, published the summer before Peter Taylor's death on November 2, 1994, a man, the narrator's cousin, "chucks" his family, his home, and his identity, and disappears.
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Reviews

November 1995

The Edinburgh Brute

By Theodore Pappas

It was the spring of 1893, and Arthur Conan Doyle was plotting murder. "I am in the middle of the last Holmes story," Doyle wrote to his mother, "after which the gentleman vanishes, never to return.
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Reviews

November 1995

Rising From the Dead

By George Garrett

All three of these books are, each in its own way, dedicated to the proposition that the past is alive and deserves to be preserved and protected against the forces of barbaric ignorance and indifference.
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Reviews

November 1995

Mirror & Labyrinth

By James O. Tate

The topic of Poe and Borges is as compelling as it is restricted, and Professor Irwin has made sure we understand that what is narrow may also be deep. Indeed, he peers through an aperture which in his perspective opens to take in a universe.
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Reviews

September 1995

Babylon Revisited

By James O. Tate

This snowball of a book, gathering mass as it accelerates, is studded with accretions and revisions. A work of cultural criticism rather than of mere literary or even social history, it seems to make its own rules as it goes.
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Reviews

September 1995

Role Models and Poetry

By E. Christian Kopff

Societies, as much as individuals, need role models. For good and for ill, our cultural tradition has been influenced by the figures of Achilles and Odysseus, placed at the center of our moral imagination by Homer almost three millennia ago.
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Reviews

September 1995

Murder in the Wasteland

By Wayne Allensworth

The mystery, like Greek tragedy, the plays of Shakespeare, or American Western films, is, paradoxically, freed by the very confines of its formula to explore the human condition.
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Vital Signs

July 1995

Homer Nods

By William F. Wyatt

The author David Halberstam gave the principal address at the convocation opening Brown's 1994-95 academic year. Time was when only the president of the university spoke, but recent presidents have instituted the policy of having a distinguished...
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Reviews

June 1995

Beyond Trash

By Clyde Wilson

In the middle part of this century one of the main staples of the Anglo- American reading public was the historical novel, or romance. Such "swashbucklers" were not great literature, but they had their virtues.
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June 1995

The Country Writer

By Wendell Berry

I am as grateful for this award as I am surprised by it, and I certainly did not see it coming. Obviously, it cannot be easy to feel worthy of an award bearing the name of T.S. Eliot, and so probably I ought to say that I am grateful, but...
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June 1995

Cleaning Our Stables

By Gore Vidal

In the mindless babble that passes for political debate in the United States, nothing means what it appears to mean, particularly those key words "liberal" and "conservative." For political purposes the latter seems to have demonized the former....
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June 1995

Once Upon a Time in America

By Bill Kauffman

One of the strangest rituals in the United States Senate is the annual reading of President Washington's Farewell Address. The chore of recitation usually falls to a freshman nonentity eager to curry favor by performing what is regarded as a...
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June 1995

Frederick Turner and the Rebirth of Literature

By Paul Lake

The breach that opened between the serious and popular arts during the early years of this century has so widened over subsequent decades that the current "postmodern" era is characterized by a kind of cultural schizophrenia.
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Correspondence

June 1995

The Gay Nihilism of Umberto Eco

By Andrea Sciffo

Simone Weil wrote, with respect to literature, that "nothing is more beautiful, wonderful, ever new, ever more surprising, more sweetly and lastingly intoxicating than the good. Nothing is more arid, sad, monotonous and cranky than the had.
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Perspective

June 1995

Literature Among the Ruins

By Thomas Fleming

In his life Ford seems to have known nearly every writer worth knowing. Through his grandfather, the painter Madox Brown, and his uncle William Rossetti, he was connected to the Pre-Raphaelites.
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June 1995

For Love of the Muse

By Stacey Kors

A British poet of Irish descent, Peter Russell was born in Bristol, England, in 1921, and by age three—"before I knew my alphabet"—had already decided that he wanted to be a poet "or nothing."
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Reviews

June 1995

A Happy Man in a Terrible Century

By Max Oelschlaeger

The claim to objectivity on the part of reviewers is, if not ill informed, precious. I make no claim to offer the one true reading of Edward O. Wilson's autobiography. However, by my scheme of reckoning, he is one of the cultural giants of the...
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Vital Signs

June 1995

Erato in the Throes

By Ralph De Toledano

The poet has been rejected by our civilization, because that civilization is no longer at ease with itself and spends its time rubbing camphor on a rheumy chest, while it contemplates its navel.
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Reviews

May 1995

Johnson in His Time

By Frank Brownlow

Every well-read person used to know Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and, knowing that collection, knew who Richard Savage was—or at least knew who Richard Savage told people he was.
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Reviews

May 1995

Brief Mentions

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Romano Guardini (1885-1968), a Roman Catholic priest and professor of Christian philosophy at the universities of Breslau, Berlin, Tubingen, and Munich, was a year old when he emigrated with his parents to Germany from his native Italy.
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Reviews

April 1995

Lucky Him

By James O. Tate

A wit and a fussbudget as well as a scholar, Paul Fussell is one of the best essayists and observers around. For personal as well as literary reasons, there is no one better qualified to undertake a study of the writings of Sir Kingsley Amis.
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Reviews

March 1995

All Post-Keynesians Now

By James J. Novak

For connoisseurs of biography, Robert Skidelsky's projected three-volume work, John Maynard Keynes, will rank with the best of the genre. The first volume appeared over a decade ago under the subtitle Hopes Betrayed. The second volume, under...
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Reviews

March 1995

Of Time and the River

By Collie Owens

It is fitting that two of these outstanding volumes of poetry (Taylor's and Weider's) gather work from over 20 years of the poets' respective careers; fitting because all three collections exhibit a concern for the passage of time, both its...
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Reviews

February 1995

Lies, Damn Lies, and Absurdities

By Loxley Nichols

Despite its optimistic title, Recovering American Literature is really about the severity of illness, the magnitude of loss. In a book weighted with evidence, Peter Shaw shows literature has suffered by subverting art to politics.
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Vital Signs

February 1995

Remembering Cleanth Brooks

By William Mills

Cleanth Brooks, one of the giants of literary criticism, died last May 10. He was 87 years old. He taught thousands of us how to read a poem or a story. Some he taught over a half-century by way of the classroom, some in his numerous public...
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Reviews

January 1995

A Lot of Nerve

By Jane Greer

It was an editor's dream: poems of this caliber, unsolicited and unexpected, in my post office box. The verse was assertive, muscular, practiced but never unsurprising. Who was this man?
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Reviews

January 1995

Dreams of Gold

By Gregory McNamee

If California were to secede from the United States and establish itself, as its first Anglo settlers once intended, as an independent republic, it would instantly emerge as one of the world's richest nations.
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Reviews

December 1994

Negative Capability

By William Mills

So many things have been said in praise of McCarthy's work that it is hard not to sound like an echo. Inevitably, the reviewer notes the energy and grace of his style, and there is no gainsaying that.
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Reviews

November 1994

Reimagining a River

By Stephen Bodio

In 1944, a party of German prisoners-of-war escaped from a camp in Phoenix, armed with old maps and with the intention of stealing a boat and sailing to Mexico. When they saw the "pitiful trickle" that is the modern Gila, they began to hike...
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September 1994

Technovandals and the Future of Libraries

By Michael Gorman

There are discussions at all levels of government about the future of libraries. The federal government is proceeding with plans for the I-WAY (otherwise known as the National Information Superhighway), blithely assuming that it will, at a time...
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September 1994

All Such Filthy Cheats

By Theodore Pappas

When Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman announced on January 18 his decision not to pursue confirmation as Secretary of Defense, he repeated Robert Massie's old charge that William Safire is a plagiarist, saying this "does not, in my judgment, put...
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Reviews

September 1994

Back to the Future

By Christine Haynes

Andrew Lytle, in his family memoir A Wake for the Living, compares the past to a foreign country. "If we dismiss the past as dead," he writes, "and not as a country of the living which our eyes are unable to see, as we cannot see a foreign...
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Reviews

September 1994

Theme From 'A Summer Place'

By James O. Tate

The products of mass culture are not automatically to be sneered at, first because of their massive presence and second because sometimes they have a certain merit or are somehow amusing.
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Reviews

August 1994

Still Storied

By James O. Tate

So much success and so much variety are self-recommending to any reader hungry for the good stuff; and I have cited only a few of many pieces.
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Reviews

July 1994

Border Crossings

By Gregory McNamee

It is by now a truism to say that the border between the United States and Mexico encompasses a third nation, one that shares in both societies but that forms its own culture.
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Vital Signs

June 1994

The Weremother: A Short Story

By Kit Reed

Often in that period in her life, when she least expected it, she would feel the change creeping over her. It would start in the middle of an intense conversation with her younger son or with her daughter, behind whose newly finished face she saw...
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Reviews

June 1994

A Documented Life

By Frank Brownlow

Muriel Spark (1992 winner of the Ingersoll Foundation's T.S. Eliot Award) is a prolific writer with some 19 novels to her credit as well as volumes of poetry, short stories, criticism, and biography. Yet she was a surprisingly late starter.
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May 1994

Writer and Community

By Fred Chappell

Most writers feel honored by literary prizes—in the way I feel so honored by the award of the T.S. Eliot prize—whether they accept them or not. At the same time, many writers share the wish that their vocation could be carried on anonymously.
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May 1994

Andrew Lytle and the Cultivation of American Letters

By William Pratt

The name of Andrew Lytle should be better known than it is: he has been a distinguished novelist and author of some widely anthologized short stories; an essayist, historian, and memoirist; an editor of the Sewanee Review for many years; and a...
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Reviews

May 1994

Suspect Company

By Richard M. Gamble

The editors of The Oxford Companion to the Bible describe their work as "an authoritative reference for key persons, places, events, concepts, institutions, and realities of biblical times" and as a guide to the current "interpretation of these...
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Reviews

May 1994

Mountain Musings

By Gregory McNamee

The Ozark Mountains make up an area that American literature has largely passed by, leaving it the province of folklore and song, of homespun stories that seldom make their way to the lowlands. Ken Carey's fine new book about the region, Flat...
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April 1994

The 40th Anniversary of Fahrenheit 451

By Paul A. Trout

Last year was the 40th anniversary of the publication of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's gripping futuristic novel about a dumbed-down American society-of-the-spectacle that pays its "firemen" to burn books.
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Vital Signs

April 1994

Anatomy of an Inaugural Poem

By John Meroney, Jr.

Evidence that Maya Angelou may have borrowed from another poem for the one she delivered at Bill Clinton's inauguration was reported in this magazine last December. The White House, having seen the December Chronicles and the subsequent news...
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Reviews

April 1994

Degrade and Fall

By Christine Haynes

I was reading Arthur Goldhammer's translation of Maurice Lever's Sade as the Senator Packwood scandal raged on, and although I wouldn't want to draw any unwarranted comparisons between the two bonhommes, the parallels between Ancien Régime France...
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Vital Signs

April 1994

Tiger, Tigre: The Perils of Translation

By John Lukacs

In November 1875, in a gas-lit flat over a rain-soaked street in Tours, a law student sat together with a young Portuguese widow. They were rifling through her letters. She had been a minor actress in Bordeaux and had played at the Haymarket...
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Reviews

April 1994

Gathering the Desert

By Gregory McNamee

It is ironic that the modern environmentalist movement was founded bv men with whom most modern environmentalists would have nothing to do today: game hunters, many so avid for the chase that they would spend fortunes to collect antlers and skins...
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Reviews

April 1994

Brief Mentions

By John C. Chalberg, H.W. Crocker III

The perfect gift for the armchair warrior. The Patton Mind traces the intellectual development of a "profane man of action" who, Roger Nye notes, "left behind the most complete record of exhaustive professional study of any World War II...
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Vital Signs

March 1994

Politically Correct Nursery Rhymes

By Ken Boguz

Political correctness may have started in the universities, but it has begun to trickle down into other areas of American culture. I recently discovered a new series of biographies for children that includes lives not only of George Washington...
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Reviews

February 1994

Pluggers

By R.S. Gwynn

There is a cartoon that I see from time to time called "Pluggers," a one-panel affair offering variations on a single theme: "You're a plugger if. . . . "
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Reviews

February 1994

Short Constructions

By William Baldwin

You don't have to read far into the story collection Thief of Lives before John Cheever's name comes to mind, but after so many years of writing, Kit Reed must be used to that comparison.
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Reviews

February 1994

He Loved New York

By James P. Degnan

Long regarded by critics, fans, and various of his colleagues at the New Yorker as America's finest literary journalist, 85-year-old Joseph Mitchell had not, until recently, published a word since 1965, and people wondered what he was doing in...
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December 1993

There Are Left the Mountains

By Bill Kauffman

Archibald MacLeish—"macarchibald maclapdog macleish," e.e. cummings dubbed him—wondered, from his sinecure as Librarian of Congress in 1940, why "the writers of our generation in America" had such a provincial indifference to the war in Europe.
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December 1993

Louis Bromfield's America

By Allan C. Carlson

Malabar Farm drew a large crowd the summer day I was there, mostly busloads of the elderly on excursion from the "senior centers" of Ohio. They came to see Louis Bromfield's legacy—the once famous agricultural experiment that is now a state park.
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Vital Signs

December 1993

Maya Angelou's Inaugural Poem: Plagiarized or Inspired?

By John Meroney, Jr.

When Bill Clinton picked writer Maya Angelou to create and read a poem at his swearing-in ceremony, he was given kudos by the media and academia for the "diversity" and brilliance of his selection.
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Reviews

December 1993

The Survival of the Fattest

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Late one summer afternoon, tired and dirty after four days' camping and a 21-mile ride out of the Wind River Mountains over rough granite trails, 1 swung off the horse and opened the registry book that the National Forest Service places at the...
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Reviews

December 1993

In the Fullness of Time

By Peter J. Stanlis

Perhaps the best way to understand and appreciate Joseph Pappin's unique achievement is to consider this fine book in the light of previous scholarship that attempts to ascertain the religious and moral sources and foundations of Edmund Burke's...
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Reviews

December 1993

Lonesome No More

By Gregory McNamee

All literary genres have their loyalists, but few have more devoted—and querulous—readers than the Western. So when in the mid-1980's rumors began to circulate that Larry McMurtry, hitherto known for his angst-ridden tales of modern Texas, was at...
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Reviews

November 1993

The Self-Same Beast

By Paul Hollander

The collapse of communist systems has not eliminated the need for a better understanding of the impact they had and how and why they persisted.
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Reviews

November 1993

The Shock of Recognition

By James O. Tate

The academic presses are often the source of the most exciting books, though these volumes too often escape the notice of the larger public.
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Vital Signs

November 1993

Exclusive: Writer's Mags Exposed

By Stephen Provizer

Who's responsible for all those "Writer's magazines" clogging the newsstands of Harvard Square? The unsuspecting peruser who comes to these periodicals seeking professional advice will be disappointed to find that they read like a cross between...
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Reviews

October 1993

The American Exception

By Larry Pratt

A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to "look at other countries," where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws.
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Reviews

October 1993

Pro Patria

By James O. Tate

The recent passing of Mel Bradford has cast a chastening light upon this latest of his collections. Who had wished to be reminded of the author's indispensability in this or indeed any other way?
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Reviews

October 1993

Beautiful Excess

By Fred Chappell

The Hard to Catch Mercy, William Baldwin's entrancing first novel, is bound to remind some readers of Mark Twain, especially of some of the bleaker pages of moral fables like The Mysterious Stranger and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
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Reviews

September 1993

Lizzie Borden's Mama Was No Writer

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

The line between the Old America and the New is closer than most of us think. A single generation separates not only the Western pioneer from the St. Louis suburbanite, it separates the New Woman from the Old.
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Reviews

September 1993

Thy Will Be Done

By Edward B. Anderson

P.D. James has attracted notice for how well she is able, within the confines of her mystery novels, to write about contemporary British society.
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Reviews

August 1993

Goodbye, Columbus

By Gregory McNamee

Gerald Vizenor intends in his fictions to pay due homage to Coyote, the American Indian trickster figure, through twist-and-turn narrative high jinks.
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Reviews

August 1993

So Late the Day

By Clyde Wilson

Poetry, short story, novel, drama, screenplay, criticism, the teaching of writing: George Garrett has excelled across the entire spectrum of literary art. I can call to mind no other contemporary American writer who approaches this feat, though...
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Reviews

August 1993

The State of the Art

By James O. Tate

This volume of short stories seems to me to represent, as a book, two distinct levels of meaning. The first and most insistent of these levels is of course as a diverse gathering of brilliant fictions, each one a self-justifying experience.
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Reviews

July 1993

Women and Biographers First!

By Frank Brownlow

To be really successful a modern writer must reach and hold a huge audience, and there seems to be essentially two ways of doing it: the journeyman (or tradesman-like) and the heroic-histrionic.
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Reviews

July 1993

The Placed Person

By Stephen L. Tanner

For about 30 years Wendell Berry has been writing fiction, poetry, and essays motivated by what he identifies as "a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place."
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Reviews

July 1993

Airs, Waters, Places

By Stephen Bodio

I might say at the onset that I am usually not a big fan of anthologies, though I have edited one; most end up unwieldy grab bags of vaguely related material.
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Reviews

May 1993

The End of Something

By Jeffery Meyers

Hemingway continues to fascinate. The legendary life and heroic exploits of the man who was so admired, honored, and imitated are now wellknown.
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Reviews

May 1993

Men at War

By H.W. Crocker III

Southerners have a special feeling for the pathos of history. They know what it is like to have a lost cause, a history that might be gone with the wind but is still resonant and noble for all that.
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Vital Signs

April 1993

The Quest for Bijou O'Conor

By Jeffery Meyers

In 1975 an eccentric old lady who lived near Brighton, England, with a Pekinese gave a taped interview about her affair in 1930 with Scott Fitzgerald.
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Reviews

April 1993

L'Etranger Chez Lui

By James O. Tate

I suppose that after William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy (1916-1990) has been for the last three decades the most widely read of Southern writers.
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Reviews

April 1993

Visible Poets

By R.S. Gwynn

Many readers will fondly recall the earlier incarnation of Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, published in 1978 as Remembering Poets. That book contained Donald Hall's reports of his close encounters with four giants of modernism—Robert Frost, Dylan...
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Reviews

April 1993

A Piece of the Action

By George Garrett

More than 20 years of active critical engagement since then have allowed Crews the chance to change his mind about some things, to modify some earlier judgments, and, at the very least, to admit to the need for a much more expanded and...
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Reviews

April 1993

Gerald Who?

By Bill Kauffman

Snaking out from the Middle Atlantic states is a long distinguished line of political and literary Copperheads: Millard Fillmore, Horatio Seymour, Harold Frederic, Edmund Wilson, and the Pennsylvania duo of James Buchanan and John Updike.
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Reviews

April 1993

Truth in Self-Advertisement

By Gregory McNamee

Hunter S. Thompson does not suffer fools gladly. For that matter, he seems to suffer no one at all, gladly or not. A survivor of the 1960's, he has deemed his contemporaries "a whole subculture of frightened illiterates" and those younger than...
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Reviews

March 1993

Versailles-on-Hudson

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

A critic who tries to stay abreast of the literature of his time, in any time, deserves respect as well as sympathy from less heroic readers content to pick and choose from among the deluge of titles that sends one literary year after the next...
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Reviews

March 1993

Rehabilitating Poe

By Gregory McNamee

Edgar Allan Poe was the finest American writer to be transformed into a "personality" in his own lifetime and, like François Villon, to be known less for his work than for his person.
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Reviews

March 1993

The Right Fork

By Brian Doherty

"I ask myself again why anyone would find interest in the private dimensions of my own history," muses Nobel laureate economist James M. Buchanan in his new collection of personal and intellectual autobiographical essays.
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Correspondence

March 1993

The Pilgrims' Progress

By James J. Novak

If there is one constant at yard sales, estate auctions, and second-hand bookstores in this state, it is the presence of old books, Bibles, classics, and diverse texts that once made splashes before sinking into obscurity.
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Reviews

January 1993

Second Childhoods

By Brad Linaweaver

From its beginnings, science fiction (bastard offspring of fantasy) has exerted a vulgar appeal. Some of its proponents have never shied away from this and, if anything, have celebrated the intelligent child's outlook, as witness the career of...
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Reviews

January 1993

Satyr and Satire

By James O. Tate

First published twenty years ago. The Satyr is the fourth of DeMaria's 14 novels and stands apart from his other works for its sheer playfulness, its experimental nature, and its brevity.
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Reviews

December 1992

At Arm's Length

By William WIlson

The disgruntled professor who equates academic integrity with paucity of book sales and who is thereby convinced that the masses who follow the writings of C.S. Lewis must be a cult of sorts, will take a perverse delight in the publication of his...
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Reviews

December 1992

New Writing From the Northwest

By Gregory McNamee

The Pacific Northwest of the United States, embracing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana, has long been a major source of agricultural and mineral wealth. For generations it has also served as a center for the fine arts, but only...
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Reviews

December 1992

Clap & Trap

By John Lukacs

I had heard about, but not read, "The End of History?" Francis Fukuyama's star-burst essay published in 1989; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for him as his critics chortled and pointed at history rumbling anew: people dancing atop the Berlin...
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Cultural Revolutions

December 1992

A New Venture

By Mark Royden Winchell

The Southern Classics Series is a new venture of J.S. Sanders and Company. John Stoll Sanders and his series editor M.E. Bradford are systematically resurrecting worthy titles that have disappeared from the pages of Books In Print. In so doing,...
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Reviews

November 1992

Appalled by History

By M.D. Aeschliman

For us to love our country, Burke somewhere wrote, our country must be beautiful. The sheer aesthetic ugliness of modern capitalistic civilization has been as much a reason for the revulsion against it on the part of poets, artists, and social...
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Reviews

November 1992

Passionate and Incorruptible

By James O. Tate

This beautiful little book—one that does much credit to its publisher— appears as a blessing amid the clutter and noise and ugliness that characterize the publishing industry as well as literary discourse today.
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Reviews

November 1992

A Ride Into the Sunset

By Gregory McNamee

At the age of 83, Wallace Stegner is the éminence grise of Western American literature, a man responsible for shaping the writing not only of the region but also that of points eastward, thanks to the scores of graduates from the Stanford writing...
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Reviews

November 1992

Limits to Litigation

By Jim Christie

Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but...
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October 1992

Gift: The Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte

By David R. Slavitt

Not merely a strange place, but the home of strangeness, / the land stretching away west to vertiginous / spaces beyond the imagination. / Philadelphia first, / then New York, where Nancy is living.
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Vital Signs

October 1992

Eugenio Corti

By Mario Marcolla

The strength of Corti's writing revealed in these diaries was an indication of his future literary fortunes. They offer, even to today's reader, vital matter for meditation.
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Reviews

October 1992

Bambino and Minotaur

By Jeffery Meyers

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once mentioned the self-punishing limitations of his projected but never written autobiography: "I cannot write my biography on a higher plane than I exist on.
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Reviews

September 1992

How to Write a Novel

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Cormac McCarthy is so fine a writer-for my money the best novelist in America today-that he and his work must be accepted pretty much on their own terms. Criticism therefore, in the case of Mr. McCarthy, is reducible largely to questions of taste.
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Reviews

September 1992

Trespass Against Us

By Bill Kauffman

Larry Woiwode, the North Dakota novelist (I do not mean that in a diminishing way), has described his fiction as "a continuing spiritual exercise that any reader may join in on." His fifth novel, Indian Affairs, is a fitfully satisfying workout.
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Perspective

September 1992

Literature and the Curriculum

By Thomas Fleming

The controversy over the humanities curricula is a struggle over definition, and what is at issue is not so much the nature or purposes of the American university as the identity of the American people.
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Reviews

September 1992

An Aura of Prophecy

By Mark G. Malvasi

More often than not, historians of antebellum American politics lose their perspective, and perhaps their good sense, when they encounter John C. Calhoun.
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View

August 1992

Wyndham Lewis and the Moronic Inferno

By James O. Tate

Looking back today at the achievements of the heroic modernists, we must do so with at least some degree of ambivalence. The presence of those colossi has receded with the passing of the years; and we no longer regard them as they themselves...
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Perspective

August 1992

I Love to Tell the Story

By Thomas Fleming

What is art good for, anyway? The older critics used to declare that the functions of poetry were two; entertainment and instruction.
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Reviews

August 1992

New Poetry From Italy

By Peter Russell

Florence's La Nazione, a sober conservative daily with a national circulation and founded at the time of the American Civil War, stated on November 2, 1991, that more than 10 percent of Italians today are fully occupied in "organized crime" (not...
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Vital Signs

August 1992

Politics in American Letters

By Larry Woiwode

The following was presented in acceptance of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, presented at Longwood College, Farmville, Virginia, September 20, 1991. The Dos Passos Prize is awarded to a writer in mid-career for a distinguished body of...
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Vital Signs

August 1992

The Year in the Novel, 1991

By David R. Slavitt

What we have here—not even the President has had the effrontery to deny it—is an intellectual recession. I cannot think of a year in which more; bad books received more serious attention.
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Vital Signs

August 1992

Who Is Henry Galt? Ayn Rand and Plagiarism

By Justin Raimondo

Can it be that a fraud has been perpetrated on the readers and admirers of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand—a literary and intellectual swindle that veers perilously close to plagiarism?
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Reviews

July 1992

Poetry That Matters

By R.S. Gwynn

In the May 1991 issue of the Atlantic poet and critic Dana Gioia asked "Can Poetry Matter?" Gioia, who has spent most of his working life outside of the academy, warns of a species in danger of extinction, the vanishing general audience for...
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Reviews

July 1992

Onan Agonistes

By James O. Tate

I've been trying to figure out what somebody could do with the thirty bucks (plus tax) that they're asking for Harold Brodkey's word-processing product. My copy was no bargain for free.
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Reviews

June 1992

From a Front Box

By James W. Tuttleton

Only the most devoted students of Henry Adams are likely to have bought and read the six-volume Complete Letters that Harvard University Press produced between 1982 and 1988.
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Reviews

June 1992

The Cultural Middleman

By Thomas Fleming

To start with, the process of Americanization began at birth. Within the space of one week at the Metropolitan Hospital, I started life as a Hebrew child, with the name Yitzhak-Isaac.
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Reviews

June 1992

A Writer for All Seasons

By George Core

E.B. White described Henry David Thoreau, that thorny individualist, as a regular hair shirt of a man; and no matter how much we may like the Thoreau of Walden and his other writing, few of us could bear having him as a neighbor.
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Reviews

June 1992

A Myth Imagined

By Frank Brownlow

How quickly living tradition turns into history. The Great War of 1914-18.has almost entirely receded from memory. Very few of that generation are alive to tell their stories, and as for their children, they have their own war, the Second World...
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Reviews

May 1992

Sheer Christianity

By Frank Brownlow

For a long time after "modern" first came into the language, it was an innocuous little word, the simple opposite of "ancient," and insofar as it had connotations, they were not very good ones. Shakespeare always used it to mean "commonplace,"...
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Reviews

May 1992

Cutting the Golden Key

By Joseph Pappin III

Those who know anything of contemporary scholarship or the political philosophy of Edmund Burke know that Peter J. Stanlis clearly holds the title of "Dean of Burke Studies."
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Reviews

May 1992

Scribble, Scribble

By Gregory McNamee

Of the making of books there is no end, Ecclesiastes has it. Of the making of books about the making of books there is also a perennial flow.
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Reviews

April 1992

An Empirical Jean-Jacques Rousseau

By Peter J. Stanlis

Ever since Frederika MacDonald published her massive two-volume work, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A New Study in Criticism (1905), scholars favorably disposed toward Rousseau have pursued the difficult task of rehabilitating him from the "audacious...
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Reviews

April 1992

Things as They Are

By William H. Nolte

Frank Kermode began his excellent review of this fat and feisty volume with a statement that is at once factual and wildly misleading: "Sir Victor Pritchett is a Victorian." To be sure, Pritchett was born in 1900, when the Good Queen still sat on...
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Perspective

April 1992

Literature and Freedom

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Nothing has pushed forward cultural life as much as the invention of printing, nor has anything contributed more to its democratization. From Gutenberg's time until today, the book has been the best propeller and depository of knowledge, as well...
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Cultural Revolutions

March 1992

Howard Nemerov, R.I.P.

By William Mills

Howard Nemerov, one of our country's titans of literature, died last July. He published his first book shortly after Wodd War II, and during the next 44 years a stream of 26 books garnered for him the country's most prestigious awards.
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Reviews

March 1992

The Global Villager

By Bill Kauffman

Terry Teachout was a clumsy, nearsighted teacher's pet who grew up in Sikeston, Missouri, population 17,431—"A Community That Works!" as its boosters trumpet.
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Reviews

March 1992

The Polymorph

By Gregory McNamee

Over the last three decades Fred Chappell has been steadily accumulating both an enviable publishing record—he has some twenty novels and collections of poems and stories to his credit—and a well-deserved reputation as one of the South's foremost...
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March 1992

Who Is Sylvia? What Is She?

By R.S. Gwynn

Unlike the situation of only a few decades ago, the position occupied today by women poets in American literary culture is so prominent, the range of their subjects and styles so wide, that it has become virtually impossible to make any...
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Reviews

February 1992

The Siege of Baltimore

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

It is 36 years since the gaseous incorporeal soul of Henry Louis Mencken, summoned before the throne of Him in Whom he for 76 years had expressed unbelief, presumably uttered the words the fleshly Mencken had rehearsed for such unlikely occasion.
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Reviews

February 1992

Truth in Empire

By E. Christian Kopff

He arrived at the highest seat of power late in life, after a career that most considered inappropriate for a world leader. He consolidated his popularity by the successful invasion of a small island.
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Reviews

February 1992

Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

By Gregory J. Sullivan

BAD—as distinguished from merely bad, which has always been with us—is a (late) 20th-century phenomenon. "To achieve real BAD," writes Mr. Fussell, "you have to have the widest possible gap between what is said about a thing and what the thing...
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Reviews

February 1992

Miller's Tales

By Gregory McNamee

There are any number of nasty diseases afoot to remind us of the consequences of the love-without-care platitudes Henry Miller committed to print and history. Anyone who still adheres to these ideas clearly has not been keeping up with the...
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Reviews

January 1992

Hobson's Choices

By James O. Tate

This slender volume—it embodies the 33 rd of the Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures—is most welcome. The topic is a matter of broad interest, and the author knows his stuff.
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Reviews

January 1992

Magna Mater, Full of Grace!

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

I don't believe I realized, until I began reading up on the subject of Deep Ecology, how far the rot of despair and self-loathing has penetrated the Western world. Multiculturalism as an expression of the West's failure of nerve and of confidence...
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Reviews

January 1992

The Spirit of the Age

By Matthew Scully

The Lewis Lapham story, as recounted in his earlier books, Fortune's Child and Money and Class in America, is that of a rich boy who, having been exposed as a reporter to the lot of the poor, renounces the "authority of wealth" and turns his...
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Vital Signs

January 1992

My Aunt & Unamuno

By Ralph De Toledano

In the summer of 1929, my aunt Zarita Nahon, a philologist and teacher of languages, traveled from Biarritz to Hendaye, en route to Tangier to collect the medieval Spanish balladry, lost in Spain but still extant in the coastal cities of Morocco,...
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Reviews

December 1991

Something Amis

By James O. Tate

There is nothing else like the careening prose of Sir Kingsley Amis. Somehow his syntax, his diction, and his tone have a way of collapsing in sync, so that the reader is left lurching in an air pocket of laughter.
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Reviews

December 1991

The Craft of Flesh and Blood

By Gregory McNamee

The landscape of American fiction is a bleak and dreary place these days. It wends through the somber back lots and blue highways of rural America, tends toward the grimy streets of crumbling cities, populated by somewhat dim and desperate...
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Vital Signs

November 1991

Plundered Province: The American West as Literary Region

By Gregory McNamee

"Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwardly towards our seacoast," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1808, after he had learned of such matters from the reports of Lewis and Clark.
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Vital Signs

November 1991

Notes From a Writer of Trash

By Richard S. Wheeler

The most important datum about Western fiction is that it is at the absolute bottom of the literary heap, somewhere below pornography. English professors would cavil at calling Westerns literature; they prefer to categorize Westerns as...
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Reviews

November 1991

The Best of Our Time

By Geoffrey Wagner

Elected Provost of King's College, Cambridge, in his 30's and subsequently Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, Lord Annan is a delightful person who has given us a delightful book of scintillating erudition that ranges far beyond the...
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Reviews

November 1991

Ishmael Among the Scriveners

By Thomas Fleming

The heroic age of modern poetry has been over for some time. The learned reactionaries who shaped it for two generations have all been dead for many years: Eliot (1965) and Pound (1972), Valéry (1945) and Claudel (1955), Ungaretti (1970) and...
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View

November 1991

Big Little House in American Literature

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

As even television audiences know, Laura Ingalls was born near the town of Pepin in west-central Wisconsin on February 7, 1867, second child and daughter of Charles Phillip and Caroline Quiner Ingalls.
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Reviews

October 1991

A Literary Lion

By Gregory McNamee

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) may well be the greatest unread writer America has ever produced, and certainly among the most influential.
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Reviews

October 1991

Psalms of Lament

By Kenneth R. Craycraft Jr.

"The first thing to understand is that we are all practical atheists," Stanley Hauerwas once declared in a phone conversation. "So when we ask, 'Why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?' what we really mean is, 'Why doesn't...
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Reviews

September 1991

Credulous Creatures

By Jack D. Douglas

Who now reads Alfred Kinsey? Almost no one. Who now remembers the great media event set off in 1948 by the publication of his "monumental" book of 804 pages on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male?
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Reviews

September 1991

The Christian Condition

By M. Christiane Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

This is, in fact, a book about two men, since, due to his strong personality and his close relationship to Georges Bernanos, the author plays an important part in it.
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Reviews

September 1991

Feminist Fatale

By James O. Tate

Because I well remember reading some of the pieces Mary Gordon has assembled here, I had no reason to wish to reread them and no cause to want to read the ones I'd been lucky to miss the first time around. What I think about Mary Gordon's writing...
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September 1991

The Terror of the Obvious

By George Watson

There is a painting on my wall that fascinates me. That is partly because it is beautiful, partly because of the story it tells. It is a large Dutch oil of 1658 by Hendrik van Vliet, better known for his church interiors, and it shows two men...
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September 1991

The Private Worlds of the Mind

By Anthony Harrigan

On the morning of July 13, 1985, as I noted in my journal, I woke with an exceptionally clear recollection of a dream. In it my wife, Elizabeth, and I were in a high-ceilinged Victorian room with brown walls fashioned of rotating metallic discs.
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August 1991

Adventure Fiction: The Machinery of the Dark

By Robert Sampson

Adventure fiction is vigorously alive. Although virtually ignored by critics outside specialist newsletters, the genre has long been a dominant force both in bookstores and in Hollywood.
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Perspective

August 1991

Science Fictions

By Thomas Fleming

While the genre of science fiction is hardly a century old, the roots of science fiction go deep into our history.
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View

August 1991

Writing Offbeat Westerns

By Richard S. Wheeler

The Western novel has always been hedged about with more conventions than any other category, with the possible exception of women's romances. I've often puzzled about why that is so, and even after years of thinking about it, I don't have any...
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Reviews

August 1991

I'm Nobody

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

In a prepublication interview, Leslie Fiedler remarked that he had wanted for years to use the title he has given to his latest book. In Fiedler on the Roof, however, the authorial persona resembles neither that of the effervescent Lev Teitlebaum...
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Reviews

August 1991

Divided Loyalties

By Katherine Dalton

Graham Greene died this year at 86, a ripe old age that was no small accomplishment for a man who at 19 played Russian roulette on the Berkhamsted common until he grew bored with even the possibility of his own death.
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Reviews

August 1991

Crusoe's Island

By Geoffrey Wagner

Because William York Tindall's Forces in Modern British Literature extends itself only to 1946, and because there has been nothing as wide-ranging published since, I looked forward to George Watson's book repairing the omission.
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Reviews

August 1991

Motels and Filling Stations

By Allan C. Carlson

Rural and small town America is nearly dead. A distinctive culture rooted in family farms, weakening since 1900 and seriously diseased since 1960, emerged from the 1980's in a terminal state.
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Reviews

August 1991

Partial Attraction

By Ellen Wilson Fielding

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's career seems dedicated to the principle that radicals can be reasonable. The encouraging title of her latest book suggests that they may even be realistic.
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Reviews

August 1991

The Dethronement of Reason

By Tom Bethell

The other day, according to a New York Times editorial, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were trying to put together a "reform coalition that offers new hope for Soviet politics and policy." Such a coalition might counter "the threat of a hard-line...
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Vital Signs

August 1991

Henry and Louise in the Lair de Clune

By Bill Kauffman

The day after his 101st birthday, novelist Henry W. Clune escorted my wife and me to a fine local restaurant, where we dined in the Henry Clune Room. "It's a sin to live this long," he said as we drained our preprandial martinis.
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Reviews

July 1991

You Never Know What the Day Will Bring

By James O. Tate

Charles Portis's fifth novel is of course a pleasure in its own right, but it's also an occasion—or should I say I am making it one—for reflecting on its author and his work, his style, his literary profile, the way he does things with words.
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Reviews

July 1991

On the Way Home

By Gregory McNamee

The literary map of New Mexico includes the names of many wellknown writers. To the north, in the heavily publicized vicinity of Santa Fe and Taos, are Rudolfo Anaya, John Nichols, Haniel Long, Erna Fergusson, Mary Austin, Paul Horgan.
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Reviews

July 1991

Sequins, Studs, Beads, and All

By Janet Scott Barlow

Among those interesting but not exactly timeless questions Americans have the luxury of asking themselves, one of the most persistent is, "What was the meaning of Elvis?"
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Reviews

June 1991

One-Fifth Pink

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Anticipating the latest Flashman novel is always a delight, and then there are the reviews to look forward to. The best of these are humorless, priggish, and hortatory, and read as if they had been composed by the writer with his left hand, while...
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Reviews

June 1991

The Romantic Streak

By Brad Linaweaver

A review of an early Blackford Oakes novel referred to Mr. Buckley's handling of a sex scene as the Hardy Boys go to a bordello. In this, the ninth book in the series, Buckley demonstrates a surer grasp, one might say, of such matters.
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Reviews

June 1991

Critics at Work

By William H. Nolte

Just what is "Neoconservative Criticism"? What gives it any particular essence or distinguishes it from other brands being bartered in bookstores and newsstands throughout the Republic?
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Reviews

June 1991

Red Talk

By Gregory McNamee

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was, in the old expression, a man of parts, a complex intellectual who spent much of his adult life in northern universities, a Kentucky farm boy with the heart and soul of a Confederate gentleman.
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Reviews

June 1991

Fevered Dreams

By Theodore Pappas

Collected here are 159 of E.B. White's short pieces written for the New Yorker. They show White at his best: as critic, essayist, humorist, and satirist.
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Reviews

May 1991

Visible Saints

By M.E. Bradford

There is no other American man of letters quite like Marion Montgomery. With the addition of each new book to the canon of works published by the Sage of Crawford, his achievement becomes the more astonishing; the range and depth of his thought,...
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Reviews

May 1991

Passion in Private

By Carl C. Curtis

Over the last ten years, A.N. Wilson has been compared to the great 20th-century English satirists: Waugh, Amis, and Barbara Pym. Now that he is in the process of writing a trilogy, it was inevitable that some critic would add to these the name...
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Reviews

May 1991

De Gustibus Semper Disputandum Est

By James O. Tate

I suppose this book might be called a coffee-table book. It has the shape and the lavish illustration of that kind of thing. And I suppose that of its kind, this book isn't so bad, which is not to say that it's good.
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Vital Signs

May 1991

A True Vindication of Edmund Burke

By Peter J. Stanlis

Mr. Conor Cruise O'Brien's "A Vindication of Edmund Burke," (National Review, December 17, 1990), contains many long established truths about Burke's politics—his consistency in principle, his remarkable insights and powers of prophesy, his...
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Reviews

April 1991

Love's Old Sweet Song

By James O. Tate

I once had the privilege of hearing Professor Polhemus deliver some of these pages as a lecture—the passage on the terrible end of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, which I have found as superb to read in 1990 as it was to hear in 1986.
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Perspective

March 1991

Anarchy and Family in the Southern Tradition

By George Garrett

For this issue of Chronicles we have assembled the thing in and of itself, examples of Southern literature as it is here and now, a couple of appropriate poems and a work of fiction by one of the South's finest writers, together with some good...
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March 1991

Time and the Tide in the Southern Short Story

By Madison Smartt Bell

Perhaps since the War Between the States itself, and certainly since the literary Southern Renascence became conscious of itself in the 30's and 40's, educated Southerners, and Southern writers especially, have taken their sense of history as a...
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Reviews

March 1991

Wild Thing

By Gregory McNamee

A new kind of animal stalks the land these days. If you listen closely, you can hear its strange call: chest-thumping roars alternating with keening wails and abundant sniffles. And if you look carefully, you'll doubtless soon spot one, for they...
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Reviews

March 1991

Mysterious Island

By Russell Kirk

Missaukee County, in the heart of the lower peninsula of Michigan, is perfectly flat and perfectly rural, its farms possessed by Dutch Calvinists. When first I, aged 17, traveled across the county, every farmhouse and every barn was ornamented by...
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Reviews

March 1991

Much in Little

By Katherine Dalton

When Harlan Hubbard and his wife, Anna, set themselves adrift on the Ohio in late 1946 in a homemade shantyboat, they began not only a five-year river adventure but a way of life together that was as distinctive as it was unmodern.
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Vital Signs

March 1991

A Conversation Around Southern Poetry

By Kelly Cherry, Henry Taylor

Kelly Cherry and Henry Taylor met at the University of Virginia in 1960, where he was a first-year undergraduate and she was a graduate student in philosophy. After he got over feeling inferior because the difference in their ages is only a few...
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March 1991

Ancestors

By Fred Chappell

With the deaths of Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percy the specter of the star system is loose again in the land. "Who will be their successors? Who will pick up their mantle?"
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Perspective

February 1991

What Gift?

By Charles Causley

I am a Cornishman, a Celt, born in the far southwest of England. Apart from the six years of the Second World War and my time as a student at a college of education, I have lived the whole of my life not only in the small market-town of...
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Reviews

February 1991

Poets and the Art of Interior Design

By Thomas Fleming

The sculptress Malvina Hoffman found the poetry of her friend Marianne Moore hard to understand and would sometimes ask her to read a poem aloud.
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Reviews

February 1991

The Vessels of His Meaning

By David R. Slavitt

To say that O.B. Hardison, Jr., who died last August at the age of 61, was a poet is in some respects to diminish his memory. "Poet" has become a hollow accolade, a label with an honorific charge that is not unrelated to the disesteem in which...
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Reviews

February 1991

La Florida

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

In an expedition that began in 1538 and endured until 1543, Hernando de Soto and six hundred men failed to discover in what is today Florida and the Lower American South that which they craved most to find—gold.
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Reviews

February 1991

An American Elegy

By George Garrett

When a writer lives with and writes about a character in four books and for more than thirty years, as John Updike has done with Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom—central character of Rabbit at Rest and of the quartet that began with Rabbit, Run in...
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Reviews

February 1991

'Something Like a Final Ordering'

By Daniel James Sundahl

In the seventy-seventh of The Dream Songs, John Berryman writes, "these fierce & airy occupations, and love, / raved away so many of Henry's years." The pervasive tone of Berryman's life and writing, spanning the tired, mad, and lonely years from...
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Reviews

January 1991

Great Exaggerations

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

By the early 1960's, conditions in America and in Europe had proceeded far enough that pundits and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic felt free to confirm what they referred to as "the death of God."
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Reviews

January 1991

A Province of the Republic

By James O. Tate

These volumes—one of letters, the other heavily dependent on correspondence—document and analyze, respectively, episodes of American literary history that feature three brilliant personalities.
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Reviews

January 1991

Battling the Gorgon

By William H. Nolte

In this little "Memoir of Madness," first delivered in abbreviated form at a symposium on affective disorders sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and then greatly expanded for publication...
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Vital Signs

January 1991

The Virginia Cavalier

By Marshall Fishwick

"We are Cavaliers," novelist William Caruthers boasted, "that generous, fox-hunting, winedrinking, dueling and reckless race of men which gives so distinct a character to Virginians wherever they may be found."
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Reviews

December 1990

A Durable Fire

By George Core

George Garrett is a man of letters—a member of a diminishing breed that may soon vanish. For well over three decades he has regularly published poetry, criticism, and fiction long and short; he has also written screenplays and memoirs, and...
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Reviews

December 1990

The Old Reliable

By James O. Tate

Here is a sentence that begins with the deep predication of Henry James, though not with his tone, and proceeds to a cadenza in the unmistakable Amis mode: "On current form he would never be in danger of imagining that her merely being his sister...
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Reviews

December 1990

Exit Stage Left

By Gregory McNamee

The Outside: beyond wall and watchtower, on the far lee of the border, the place of the Other, the place of exile. Now that the walls are crumbling around the world, helped along by the crowbars of angry patriots; now that the faces of the other...
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Reviews

November 1990

Death in Disguise

By Frank Brownlow

The 1950's were the high point of D.H. Lawrence's critical reputation. In those days university English professors were keen teachers of Lawrence's message of "life" and emotional honesty, and he was a popular subject for undergraduate theses.
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Reviews

October 1990

Pacific Rimshot

By Gregory McNamee

Thomas Pynchon has been living out of the public eye for almost four decades now, a literary hermit who has succeeded by his very reclusiveness in attracting more attention than his less retiring colleagues.
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Reviews

October 1990

A Representative Man

By Eugene D. Genovese

Even in these dreariest of days in academia, when American history has largely become a plaything for canting ideologues, the Old South continues to attract outstanding talent. Fine books and articles continue to appear, as Clyde Wilson's...
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Reviews

October 1990

Honest Words

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

It may be an embarrassing admission for somebody who has been a book review editor for the last 14 and a half years, but the truth is I had never heard of Tony Hillerman until May 1989, when I began traveling in the Southwest in connection with a...
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Reviews

October 1990

Escape from Grub Street

By Russell Kirk

Walter Scott, in 1820, wrote that Fielding is "father of the English Novel." Yet James Russell Lowell, in 1881, remarked to an English audience that "We really know almost as little of Fielding's life as of Shakespeare's."
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Reviews

September 1990

Invocations of Malebranche

By David Klinghoffer

"The great issues don't need to be vulgarized," observes the narrator of David Slavitt's 15th work of fiction. "They are vulgar, for they are exactly those things that everybody worries about."
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Cultural Revolutions

September 1990

Why Are You Happy?

By Thomas Fleming

Walker Percy never tired of asking a simple question: why are people happy in circumstances that ought to make them miserable?
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Reviews

July 1990

Lost in Wonderland

By Gregory McNamee

It's a brave new world out there. Factory workers are made of metal and plastic; money, an increasingly abstract proposition, is made and lost not in workshops and fields but on flickering screens . . .
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View

July 1990

Still the Colonies

By Katherine Dalton

Since the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chief propagandist for the emerging American colonies the United States has been subject to invasion by British journalists. They come for a variety of reasons.
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Reviews

July 1990

Homme Sérieux

By Frank Brownlow

Kipling should be a fascinating subject for literary history. He was enormously gifted and successful, the child of a modest, nonconformist Anglo-Scot family that, besides producing him, also produced his cousin, the conservative prime minister...
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Reviews

July 1990

Good Books That Sell Good

By David R. Slavitt

Gore Vidal's "American chronicle" is a roman fleuve that looks beyond Powell's The Music of Time to Roger Martin du Card's Les Thibaults series of the 1920's and 30's, and what it demonstrates is that our assumptions about popular culture are...
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Reviews

June 1990

Another Life of C.S. Lewis

By Lyle W. Dorsett

In 1949 Chad Walsh, at that time an obscure poet and literary critic at Beloit College in Wisconsin, published the first book on C.S. Lewis. Entitled C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Sceptics, this long out-of-print volume is still one of the best...
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Reviews

June 1990

Gnostic Epiphanies

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Cormac McCarthy, 56-years-old, is the author of five published novels, which between them have sold approximately fifteen thousand copies in the original hardcover editions, published by Random House.
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Reviews

June 1990

Edward Abbey: R.I.P.

By Wayne Lutton

With the death of Edward Abbey, aged 62, in March of last year, the Western portion of what once was really the United States lost her greatest defender of the post-World War II era.
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Reviews

June 1990

Dancing Man

By Russell Kirk

A few months past there came to visit us for a weekend, at our house in the backwoods, Mr. Andrew Lytle, man of letters, aged 87 years. Although there are not many big houses farther north than ours, and although Mr. Lytle is very much a man of...
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Reviews

June 1990

The Shiny Surface of Obscurity

By Cosma Siani

"Nobody would write verse if poetry were a question of 'making oneself understood'; indeed, it is a question of making understood that quiddity which words alone fail to convey."
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Reviews

June 1990

Dance to the Music of Time

By E. Christian Kopff

The struggle to keep poetry alive is a game of tag-team wrestling, and the greatest poets play their matches with the poets of ancient Greece and Rome. We all know it for Latin. Plautus and Vergil are centones of Greek verse, their originality...
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Reviews

June 1990

Hell Is Other People

By Florence King

Remember Kate Millett? She made the cover of Time in 1970 after her dissection of literary machismo, Sexual Politics, became a blockbuster best-seller and won her the title of leading feminist spokesperson.
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Reviews

May 1990

When the Old Order Passes

By Madison Smartt Bell

There's a story about the filming of The Big Sleep that ought to be true even if it isn't. When Howard Hawks was supervising the final cut he realized he didn't know who had killed the butler, so he summoned the screenwriter, William Faulkner, to...
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Reviews

May 1990

The Symbolic Interpreter

By William H. Nolte

Nearly thirty years after his death in 1962, Robinson Jeffers occupies a secure niche in the pantheon of American poets. I suspect, indeed, that his place may well be the most secure of all.
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Reviews

May 1990

Tyger, Tyger

By Priscilla L. Buckley

To pick up Tales of the Big Game Hunters is to suffer instant culture shock. The book plunges us into a world in which animals are slaughtered for the ivory, the skins, the racks, and the wonderful dangerous pleasure of the chase and kill.
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Reviews

May 1990

The Value of Theory

By Irving Louis Horowitz

This volume in tribute to Elizabeth Flower is loosely organized, with scarcely a mention of Flower's work—the presumption doubtless being that the general sentiments and character of her work are best captured by such a gestaltist approach.
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Reviews

May 1990

Blue Suede Shoes Are the Least of It

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Perhaps I am not the ideal reviewer for this book. I do not own a television, and I have not seen a movie in a dozen years. (I do have an AM-FM radio in my truck, which I use to monitor blizzards, sandstorms, flashfloods, and tornadoes.)
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Reviews

May 1990

Three Voices From the South

By George Core

Nearly sixty years ago John Peale Bishop published a remarkable essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review entitled "The South and Tradition."
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Reviews

April 1990

Large Canvas, Long Reach

By Fred Chappell

Madison Smartt Bell has a penchant for keeping his fiction mysterious at its deepest core. The protagonist of his 1985 novel, Waiting for the End of the World, is a fellow called Larkin who is out to destroy New York City for no reason a reader...
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Reviews

April 1990

Rouge on a Corpse's Lips

By Samuel Francis

Two ironies attend the life and career of Whittaker Chambers. The first is that the one-time Communist spy, foreign editor of Time, and witness against Soviet espionage became notable during his life and afterwards only because of the Hiss Case,...
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Reviews

April 1990

That Infamous Diary

By Murray N. Rothbard

Rarely does a published diary, even of a celebrated writer, become anything more than fodder for the specialist. Yet H.L. Mencken's diary has been turned into a cause célèbre by its editor, Charles A. Fecher.
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Reviews

April 1990

The Houdini of Talcottville

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

There are three ways in which the word "magician" may be applied to the critic and author Edmund Wilson: in his relationship to the printed word, in his relationships with women, and, more literally, as a straightforward reference to the fact of...
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Reviews

April 1990

Gradus Ad Parnassum

By James O. Tate

How neglectful of David Dubai not to write the great book on the piano, especially considering what a fine position he was in to do so! So let's get the unpleasantness out of the way first, before reviewing the merits of his study.
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Reviews

March 1990

The American Spectrum

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

There is no conflict, M.E. Bradford insists, "between preserving the language and securing a civil polity," a credo which, embedded in "What We Can Know For Certain: Frank Owsley and the Recovery of Southern History," provides the subtext for the...
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Reviews

March 1990

The Way It Felt: Hemingway's Apprentice Years

By James W. Tuttleton

If strange things are happening in the academy, perhaps none is stranger than the debate concerning the American literary canon provoked in part by the current reassessment of Ernest Hemingway's fiction.
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Reviews

February 1990

Brave Theory Puffing

By Hugh Kenner

"Few people," we find Frank Kermode saying by page 42 of his 46-page Prologue,—"Few people can take much pleasure in modern academic literary criticism except its practitioners, who do not mind that an intelligent outsider would surely find it...
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Reviews

February 1990

Space Art

By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Catholic readers of American literature have always recognized that the difference between Eastern and Western fiction is the difference between New Canaan, Connecticut, and Tuba City, Arizona.
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Reviews

February 1990

The Critic and the Conservative Imagination

By M.E. Bradford

Because of the great range of his interests, it is very difficult to predict what Professor Jeffrey Hart will next produce. Hart writes out of a devotion to literature as "the principal vehicle for transmitting the ideas and feelings that...
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Reviews

February 1990

Lost Horizon

By Mark Falcoff

The 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II has occasioned an outpouring of nostalgic literature in Great Britain. The elegiac note may be appropriate: the year 1939 was, after all, a great point of rupture.
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Reviews

February 1990

Good Lovers Are Dead Lovers

By Katherine Dalton

Charley Bland, as his father describes him, would have been a prodigal son except he never had the gumption to leave home.
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Reviews

January 1990

Walk in Beauty, Walk in Fear

By Gregory McNamee

On a windswept bluff high above the reddish-brown San Juan River, four states—Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado—converge. Visitors to the area come to play a game of twister at the Four Comers Monument, contorting themselves so that each of...
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Reviews

January 1990

Epistles From the Master

By David R. Slavitt

What an inspiring book this is! Even though the trials of the literary life are notorious and banal, there are few of us who are sufficiently hardened to the blows that we don't at least on occasion allow our guard to fall and make the mistake of...
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Reviews

December 1989

Exorcisms

By Paul Gottfried

Moshe Leshem ends Balaam's Curse with a warning against the growing political power of the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate. By yielding to Orthodox authorities on educational and cultural matters, he says, Israelis are sacrificing their democratic...
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Reviews

December 1989

Poetry You Can Read

By R.S. Gwynn

In his introduction to the 1962 Penguin anthology Contemporary American Poetry, Donald Hall wrote, "For thirty years an orthodoxy ruled American poetry. It derived from the authority of T.S. Eliot and the new critics; it exerted itself through...
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