Plato and the Pursuit of Justice

“Those who do not make justice the central concern for Plato are not talking about Plato at all.”

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Review: “Crassus: The First Tycoon” by Peter Stothard

“Now, Peter Stothard has given us the final decades of the republic through the eyes of Crassus—Rome’s wealthiest man and former consul who famously embarked on a vainglorious and ultimately failed conquest of Parthia that culminated in his embarrassing death.”

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Review: “Uncommon Wrath” by Josiah Osgood

Pierre Bouillon’s 1797 painting “The Death of Cato the Younger of Utica”

“[Josiah] Osgood’s book is a welcome and exciting read about the rivalry between Caesar and Cato; Cato, in the process, finally receives some much-deserved due in the story of the republic’s final decades.”

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Review: Waller Newell’s “Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger”

(Execution of Marie Antoinette, 16 October 1793. Executioner Charles-Henri Sanson shows her severed head to the crowd)

Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proceeding through the luminaries of German Idealism and Romanticism—climaxing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—then marching beyond Hegel to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, Newell gives a reading of philosophy gone wrong. Horribly wrong.”

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Review: Bowen Blair’s “A Force for Nature”

“Nancy Russell was one of those great heroines whose quest to save the Columbia Gorge in Oregon serves as an inspirational tale that embodies the best of American grit and determination.”

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Review: James I. Porter’s “Homer: The Very Idea”

“But the price of that fame and quasi-divine status took its toll. ‘Immortality had its costs,’ Porter writes, ‘and Homer paid for it dearly.'”

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As the Leaves Begin to Change

“In that waltz, you find me now/Singing, dancing, with the moon”

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Review: Philip Freeman’s “Hannibal”

(J.M.W. Turner’s “Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps” (1812).)

“Freeman’s book, as the author acknowledges, is written as something of a eulogy to this great man of antiquity, who has captured imaginations for two millennia.”

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Review: Eden Collinsworth’s “What the Ermine Saw”

“Almost all the key events of modern Europe were seen through the eyes of this painting, which Collinsworth vividly brings to life in her writing.”

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Review: Barry Strauss’s “The War That Made the Roman Empire”

(Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville)

“Barry Strauss, America’s foremost popular classicist, brings the story of Actium to life in ways that rival and surpass Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra…”

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Why We’ll Always Be Talking about George Orwell

(Getty Images)

“It is a shame, though, that whenever Orwell reappears it is almost always in the context of his dystopian political novel.”

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Review: “Saving Yellowstone” by Megan Kate Nelson

“Much like the United States itself, the story of Yellowstone is one of tragedy and hope, defiance and cut-throat ambition, beauty and terror, charity and callousness.”

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The Irresistible Passion of Peter Paul Rubens

(Peter Paul Rubens’s “The Elevation of the Cross”)

Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”

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Review: Bruce Clark’s “Athens: City of Wisdom”

Athens: City of Wisdom is a tour through over 3,000 years of the history of a city that has such imaginative sway and spiritual power over the hearts and minds of so many people around the world today.”

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Fifty Years of “The Godfather”

It has been 50 years since The Godfather was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972.

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