Literature

An Antidote to the Excesses of Our Age 0
- Literature
- September 27, 2021
Northwestern Europe’s early development owes much to the Carolingian dynasty, which led Germanic society into Christendom from the dead end of paganism. It set the stage for the lush flowering of knightly culture, with its ideals of chivalry, courtesy, and courtly love, which established the Western habit of mind. This Western ethos is rooted in
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Diversity Fiction Meets Culture-Clashing Truth 0
- Literature
- September 13, 2021
Homeland Elegies: A Novel, by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown & Co.; 368 pp., $28.00). Mark Twain wrote in his 1897 travel book, Following the Equator: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” That saying came in handy as I read this book, described on its jacket as
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Charting American Decline 0
- Literature
- August 12, 2021
“After the quiet 1950s…incidents of political violence again became more frequent and now we may be in the middle of another wave of sociopolitical instability.” Thus five years ago wrote Peter Turchin, a University of Connecticut professor specializing in “historical social science,” a.k.a. Cliodynamics. After 2020’s violent nationwide political protests and the pandemic’s destruction of
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The Meaning of Milo 0
- Literature
- July 9, 2021
Milo Chronicles By Rachel Fulton Brown Published by Dangerous Books This extraordinary tome proposes a cure for our cultural illness: the resurgence of the muscular Christianity that once permeated higher education. The success of Fulton Brown’s project is far from assured, but in this essay collection she embraces the task with zealous ecstasy. The book is
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Scaramouche: Rogue of the French Revolution 0
- Literature
- June 23, 2021
A good historical novel—as Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche is—resembles a bridge game, where the hands and strategies are revealed only gradually. History itself unfolds irregularly, with disruptions, false starts, and surprises. Against the backdrop of complicated, vicious, and corrosive events in France in the late 1780s and early 1790s, Sabatini draws his characters from smallscale lives into the great
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Derek Chauvin: The Great White Defendant 0
- Literature
- April 22, 2021
In the brilliant novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” author Tom Wolfe describes what he calls the intense media interest in covering “The Great White Defendant.” A review of “Bonfire” explains: The overarching theme of the book is the search for the great white defendant. The vast majority of defendants in New York City are
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