Category: REVIEW

Faith for Doubters

Brinkmann’s book is a respectful, thoughtful tome seeking to question faith honestly. He freely admits that he is simultaneously sceptical on issues of faith and belief and deeply fascinated by religion.

Radical Sympathies

Henry James praised Ivan Turgenev because, though the man possessed a pessimistic streak, in his novels he painted tender pictures that bled sympathy for all.

FORGOTTEN CLASSICS:
Sir Gawain and the Christmas Night

Sir Gawain is a dramatic tale of a knight’s bravery and chastity in the face of temptation and, crucially, the distinctive experience of grace and forgiveness that Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection has made possible.

Economics and the Future of the Right

DiLorenzo’s ‘Politically Incorrect Guide’ comes at a time in which the majority of young people in the West are predicted to experience less freedom and economic prosperity than their parents or grandparents enjoyed.

A Lady Macbeth To Die For Conquers New York

Conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson’s deft, efficient gestures captured the performance with balance between its driving sonic eccentricities and subtler and more contemplative passages.

When the Law Defines What It Means to Be Human

Today, it is all too common to prize self-sufficiency as a virtue—a virtue by nature inaccessible to the sick and to the disabled, to pregnant women and to the elderly, and to children of any age.

Carl Trueman on Our Strange New World

How did we get here? As Trueman explains it, three intertwining concepts and their origins must be understood to grasp our current culture: expressive individualism, the sexual revolution, and our social imaginary.

Rehabilitating the Dismal Science

Rehabilitating the Dismal Science

In this massive study, Gregory Collins is able to smoothly blend Burke’s economic thought with his thoughts on politics and human nature.

May 16, 2022
A French History of Traditionalists

A French History of Traditionalists

The subject of these pages is, in a broad sense, religious—Catholic—traditionalists. Yves Chiron also explains why being a ‘traditionalist’ is not exactly the same as being a ‘traditional’ Catholic.

Feverish Episodes of Nazi Reverie

Feverish Episodes of Nazi Reverie

As a work of serial military fabulism, Ezquerra’s book is an interesting cultural artifact. I laughed more than once at the author’s sheer gall, but Ezquerra himself is an unpleasant figure. A literary liar is bad enough; a Nazi literary liar seems even more obscene.

Heaven Bleeds Backwards into our Lives

Heaven Bleeds Backwards into our Lives

The novel illustrates St. Catherine of Siena’s famous quote, “The path to Heaven is Heaven.” St. Catherine did not say whether the path felt like Heaven at the time, but she was certain that it was, in all essentials, Heaven. In other words, Heaven bleeds backwards into our lives, until every moment is colored with its otherworldly hues. That is the feat Vodolazkin accomplishes in this novel.

May 2, 2022
<i>The Leopard</i> Finally Gets an Operatic Adaptation

<i>The Leopard</i> Finally Gets an Operatic Adaptation

American composer Michael Dellaira secured the operatic rights to Lampedusa’s novel after rereading it following a trip to Sicily in 2014. Pandemic complications froze the entire performance world for two years, so the opera only had its world premiere in March 2022, in a run of two performances by the Frost Opera Theater.

May 1, 2022
FORGOTTEN CLASSICS:<br>The Disneyfication of Culture

FORGOTTEN CLASSICS:<br>The Disneyfication of Culture

Judging by the 1942 film, the story of Bambi is a relatively simple and childish tale. True, it famously deals with Bambi’s loss of his mother, but in general the movie leaves viewers with the banal, sentimental, fuzzy feelings that has made Disney an entertainment juggernaut. But these are not the feelings Salten’s original novel produces, nor is the novel particularly intended for children. How, then, did Disney’s image of Bambi become the predominant one? And how does this story and its reception shed light on our current Western culture?

April 30, 2022
La tradition, c’est moi

La tradition, c’est moi

It is noticeable that many of the book’s Anglophone contributors are almost bewildered by the sudden papal attack on the traditional liturgy. This is a shortcoming of the Anglo-centric perspective, which underestimates the depth of the antipathy towards the Apostolic Roman Rite amongst many non-Anglophone bishops.

April 29, 2022
Acknowledging Inevitable Subjectivity: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950)

Acknowledging Inevitable Subjectivity: Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950)

70 years ago Akira Kurosawa won the Oscar for his film Rashomon. In our world, that demands us to constantly pick sides, the tale of four different versions of a story, that questions our perceptions of reality and our inevitable subjectivity, is as current as ever.

April 24, 2022
Looking East: Hungary’s Lessons for Britain

Looking East: Hungary’s Lessons for Britain

Particularly in Britain, the New Culture Forum’s film is likely to evoke plaintive sentiments, if not downright fury. Indeed, the UK Conservative government has altogether less to show for itself than the Hungarians do after an equivalent period of now twelve years in Downing Street.

April 21, 2022
A Disappointing <em>Don Carlos</em>

A Disappointing <em>Don Carlos</em>

Set against the production’s dismal sets, the action unfolded as a five-hour dirge of funereal hopelessness before ejecting spectators into equally gray Manhattan surroundings where after-theater conviviality is long dead.

April 21, 2022
The Cure Was Worse Than the Disease

The Cure Was Worse Than the Disease

The essential thesis of the book is, regardless of the efficacy of pandemic management measures, that there was never an assessment of what the likely damage was going to be. The equation between benefit and damage was unbalanced; in fact, the damage side was left blank.

April 11, 2022
The Scattershot Musings of Slavoj Žižek

The Scattershot Musings of Slavoj Žižek

Despite his colourful pessimism, Žižek still appears to indulge the fallacy that some combination of good will, rationality, and imagination is up to the task of saving our fallen world.

April 8, 2022