Books

Article

Who Decides?

Yuval Levin reconstructs the conflict over Edmund Burke’s angry 'Reflections on the Revolution in France' and Thomas Paine’s incandescent reply, 'The Rights of Man.'
Article

Absurd Reality

Imre Kertész is a concentration-camp survivor who keeps a distance from the slogans that remind us “never again.” His novels and short stories spell out these views.
Article

Born-Again Fiction

Kate Atkinson folds coincidence and a kind of Borges-like fantasy into the framework of a classic English country-house novel.
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Faith-Based Persecution

Though the number of Christians killed and persecuted every year is contested, Shortt clears away misconceptions that other religions are the source of the problem.
Article

Roth at Rest

Pierpont presents a picture of Philip Roth’s works that contains necessary qualifications: there is no dutiful approval of every word the master has written.
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Making Do

The men who tell their stories in 'Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City' know that they don’t look much like Ward Cleaver or Cliff Huxtable.
Article

Dworkin’s Jisei

'Religion Without God' is a lovely swan song. It is short—it’s based on the Einstein Lectures delivered at the University of Bern in 2011—but eloquent and rich.
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Grief Detained

Barnes's broodings are intelligent, often eloquent, and just to the elegiac occasion. But Barnes is also sometimes hard.
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Squeaky Hinge

Thomas Cahill's words are not easy to understand but point to a persistent presentism, a tendency to view the past through the lens of the present.
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Witness

'Story of a Secret State' promises an insider’s perspective on Poland’s Home Army, the largest resistance organization in Nazi-occupied Europe --- and delivers it.
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Voracious

Sartre was unquestionably one of those by whom language lives, and vice versa. Many people read voraciously; Sartre wrote voraciously.
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Making the Past Present

As with many of Auden’s longer poems, 'For the Time Being' is a slippery beast. Whenever you think you’ve got a hold of it, it goes off in another direction.
Article

Accidental Selections

The books I’m recommending here I more or less bumped into by accident, usually when some reviewer or author of a memoir took the trouble to cite something good.
Article

A Bold Piece

Alice McDermott's latest novel is a compelling accounting of a life that begins in Depression-era Brooklyn and winds its way to the late-twentieth-century suburbs.
Article

Legalese

It is a mark of Antonin Scalia's pioneering influence that originalism and fidelity to text have become a staple of the Supreme Court’s interpretive methodology.
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