Category: REVIEW

The Long Slow Death of Hong Kong

While I agree with the aims and even admire the methods of the protesters of 2019 to 2020, it is likely that when China does assume full control of the Hong Kong territory, they will have made things worse.

Redeeming Our Asymmetric Culture War

Today, the cultural warfare is nothing if not asymmetric. History and culture are important enough to merit a lively debate, but the one-sided onslaught on everything from Western art to our national heroes, thunders Murray, should not be indulged for a moment longer.

Revealing the Dark Angel

What Lionel Johnson awaited was a biographer who shared both his deep Faith and his soaring erudition in order to convey his work both in its true significance to its author, and on its own terms. With Robert Asch, Johnson has at last found him.

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.

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

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

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.

The Leopard 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.

FORGOTTEN CLASSICS:
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?

The End of Outremer

The End of Outremer

Canadian-Lebanese writer Nader Moumneh’s 2018 book fills a useful niche in that it is a sympathetic and detailed overview of the main Lebanese Christian military-political formation born during the Lebanese Civil War, a formation that became a leading Lebanese nationalist political party after the war ended.

December 13, 2021
Ahmari & the Challenge of Tradition

Ahmari & the Challenge of Tradition

When I agreed to review Sohrab Ahmari’s newest book, I wasn’t expecting to learn anything I didn’t know before. I

Misunderstanding Bannon

Misunderstanding Bannon

Unlike other ‘Bannon-watchers’—many of who seem unable to resist casting him as a Rasputin-like figure, while being simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by his insistence on speaking in symbolic and often apocalyptic terms—Teitelbaum approaches his subject from an unlikely angle.

June 19, 2020