Review 5 February 2012
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Humanizing the Social Sciences
Gerald J. Russello
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Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore
by Peter L. Berger.
Prometheus Books, 2011, 264pp, hardcover, $26.
Best of the Bookman 5 February 2012
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Textbooks and the Audience for Poetry
Robert Beum
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In this essay from Spring 1964, poet Robert Beum points to some virtues of poetry and offers a modest proposal to address the decline of poetry in American culture.
Review 29 January 2012
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On the Matter of Authentic Conservatism and Political Faith
Hunter Baker
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From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism. By D. G. Hart. Eerdmans, 2011. 237 pages. $25.
Best of the Bookman 29 January 2012
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Oakeshott and Conservatism
Francis G. Wilson
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Rationalism in Politics and Other Essaysby Michael Oakeshott. New York: Basic Books, 1962. 333 pp. [rev ed. Liberty Fund, 1991]
Review 22 January 2012
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Contingent Conservatism
Derek Turner
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The New Politics: Liberal Conservatism or Same Old Tories?
by Peter King, Policy Press (Bristol UK), 2011, 156pp, paper, $35.
Best of the Bookman 22 January 2012
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A New ‘Rasselas’
Jeffrey Hart
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The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, by Samuel Johnson. Edited by Warren Fleischauer. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc., 1962. 189 pp. [Edition reviewed; Penguin edition (Kindle); Free edition (Kindle)]
Review 15 January 2012
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The Empire Goes Overboard
Michael J. Ard
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Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America by Benjamin L. Carp, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, Cloth, 328 pp, $30
Best of the Bookman 14 January 2012
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Memo to Irving Babbitt
John Abbot Clark
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In this Best of the Bookman essay from 1962, a writer who was then an associate professor of English at Michigan State, wrote a letter to Irving Babbitt, who died in 1933, assessing the state of education and culture in light of Babbit’s concerns during his lifetime.
Review 8 January 2012
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Political Correctness and the War Against Authority
A. W. R. Hawkins
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Society Against Itself: Political Correctness and Organizational Self-Destruction by Howard S. Schwartz, Karnac Books, 2010. Paper, 240 pp.
The Classics Revisited 8 January 2012
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Witness over Sixty Years
James E. Person Jr.
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Witness by Whittaker Chambers
(Random House, 1952)
Review 28 December 2011
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Celebrated Minor Contemporary American Poetry
Eugene Schlanger
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The Best American Poetry 2011
Edited by Kevin Young with David Lehman
Scribner (New York, NY), 2011, xxvi + 211 pp., $35.00
On Essays and Letters 28 December 2011
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‘The Greatest Fool That Ever Lived’
James V. Schall, S.J.
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In this bonus column, Father Schall reflects on the nature of philosophy, Stoicism, and the Incarnational view of life.
The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral imagination, man would live merely day to day, or rather moment to moment, as dogs do. It is the strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest.
Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things, 1969
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Here’s a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn’s argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World in the October edition of Chronicles. • At the National Catholic Register he discusses a recent Colorado religious liberty case denying families access to funds for private education, based on an outdated reading of a bigoted “Blaine”-style amendment. • In The Wilson Quarterly, he reviews Why Trilling Matters.
(15 Oct 2011)
The Imaginative Conservative blog has posted an excerpt and link to an essay by Pepperdine’s Ted McAllister on Kirk’s Conservative Mind that is worth a look: “What was then more readily an act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.”
(1 Oct 2011)
Gerald Russello reviews Michael Toth’s book on founding father Oliver Ellsworth in the Wall Street Journal: “Uniting the Nation.”
(25 Sep 2011)
Other Sites of Interest
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