It should have been easy for Herman Melville to hate Manhattan—the “Babylonish brick-kilns of New York,” as he wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851. It was there in Manhattan he was born in 1819, at 6 Pearl Street, down by the Battery, while his ambitious, hard-driven father busily bankrupted . . . . Continue Reading »
Josh Billings remarked profoundly that “the trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much as ain’t so.” There are those who know John Chrysostom said that “the image of God is not found in Woman.” (Actually, he said that “the image of God is not found in . . . . Continue Reading »
It is common in some circles to say that our legal system worries too much about rights and not enough about responsibilities. The complaint is a fair one, as far as it goes. But the real problem with rights—and with what Mary Ann Glendon calls “rights talk,” a kind of talk that dominates . . . . Continue Reading »
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memoryby deborah lipstadt free press, 278 pages, $22.95 Assassins of the Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust by pierre vidal-naquet, translated by jeffery mehlman columbia university press, 205 pages, $27.50Ever since the end of . . . . Continue Reading »
The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke by conor cruise o’brien university of chicago press, 602 pages, $34.95 At the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and 11th Street in Washington, D.C., a wandering tourist will find himself standing beneath the gaze of a . . . . Continue Reading »
The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology by gary dorrien temple university press, 500 pages, $34.95 In a sense, modern American political thought is a battle for the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. With the exception of the most committed . . . . Continue Reading »
Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society by jerry z. muller free press, 272 pages, $22.95 A good work of intellectual history should exemplify two qualities above all: an imagination that allows the author to “pass over” into the horizon of his subject in order to see the . . . . Continue Reading »
Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne by edward haviland miller university of iowa press, 596 pages, $35 Jefferson’s public career focused on securing for Americans,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan has written, “a right of expatriation from the past.” This was a large . . . . Continue Reading »
Theology and Dialogue edited by bruce d. marshall university of notre dame press, 302 pages, $14.95 paper. These “essays in conversation with George Lindbeck” are also essays in deserved celebration of a thinker who has done as much as anyone in the last half-century to advance ecumenical . . . . Continue Reading »
The Founders of the Western World: A History of Greece and Rome by Michael Grant Scribner’s, 351 pages, $27.50 Michael Grant has written so many books about the Greeks and Romans that his latest reads like a textbook. As he acknowledges in the introduction, the present book is a shortened . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
