The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century by helena rosenblatt princeton, 368 pages, $35 Liberalism, says Helena Rosenblatt, has grown ineffective as it has forgotten the role that public morality, virtue, and conceptions of the common good played in its . . . . Continue Reading »
The Romanovs: 1613–1918 by simon sebag montefiore vintage, 784 pages, $35 The Romanovs Under House Arrest: From the 1917 Diary of a Palace Priest by afanasy belyaev translated by leonid michailitschenko holy trinity, 136 pages, $29.95 The Romanov dynasty begins and ends with one name: . . . . Continue Reading »
Everybody knows the Decalogue and, in particular, the commandment “You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain” (Exod. 20:7). In spite of this warning, we too easily call God “Lord”—nay, we invoke him as “the Lord”—as if such a word were devoid of ambiguity and not badly . . . . Continue Reading »
Confession: Catholics, Repentance, and Forgiveness in America by patrick w. carey oxford, 392 pages, $34.95 In the 2013 Joseph Gordon-Levitt romantic comedy Don Jon, the porn-obsessed title character hits the confessional, reels off his usual list of sins against chastity, and then . . . . Continue Reading »
As the #MeToo movement has spread from the upper echelons of Hollywood to the halls of Congress, what has most struck me is the startling disconnect between the movement’s feverish sensitivity to sexual impropriety, on the one hand, and women’s eager embrace of our nation’s sex-drenched . . . . Continue Reading »
Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator by enrique moradiellos i.b.tauris, 264 pages, $30 Not long after the successful Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain, removed a photograph of Adolf Hitler from his desk in the Pardo Palace in Madrid. He promptly replaced . . . . Continue Reading »
One evening in the late 1960s, the students gathered in Yeshiva University’s major study hall to learn Talmud were treated instead to a speech by Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, the young director of the advanced graduate rabbinic program. The topic was the struggle of Soviet Jews to emigrate. Unlike . . . . Continue Reading »
Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile by nassim nicholas taleb random house, 1,568 pages, $70 Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by nassim nicholas taleb random house, 304 pages, $30 Boethius’s ambitious goal to synthesize all . . . . Continue Reading »
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World by christopher de hamel penguin, 640 pages, $45 Illuminated manuscripts remain cultural touchstones of the Middle Ages, symbols of forgotten learning, mystery, and beauty. Unfortunately, they are often locked away in . . . . Continue Reading »
When Eleanor Roosevelt and a small group of people gathered at the behest of the U.N. in early 1947 to draft the world’s first “international bill of rights,” they cannot have had very high hopes for their endeavor. The world was awash in colonial oppression, discrimination, poverty, and . . . . Continue Reading »
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