“My own song ‘Alabama’ richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don’t like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending…”
Featured Interview
NATO & the Global Enduring Disorder
This project examines the coordination failures surrounding international approaches to climate change, tax havens, cryptocurrency, the crises in Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan, and more—seeking to move past merely problematizing failures—to proposing solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.Erich Prince’s Latest Column
Latest from the Arts
Latest Book Review
Erich J. Prince
Erich J. Prince is the editor of Merion West. Erich has contributed to a variety of publications including The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Hartford Courant, The News & Observer, the Orlando Sentinel, and The Hill. He studied political science at Yale, completing his thesis on polarization in the United States Congress.
Category: Criticism
A Once Unnecessary Reminder: Criticism Produces Good Works
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.'”
Review: Philip Freeman’s “Hannibal”
“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.”
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.”
Review: Riley Black’s “The Last Days of the Dinosaurs”
“This is a story about the meek inheriting the Earth.”
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.”
“Father Stu”: A Story of Hardship and Redemption
“One of the spiritual overtones present in Father Stu is one important to Christian teaching: the merit of suffering. The Christ-like endurance of suffering is particularly embodied in Long himself.”
The Irresistible Passion of Peter Paul Rubens
“Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”
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.”
Fifty Years of “The Godfather”
It has been 50 years since The Godfather was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972.
Review: Roosevelt Montás’s “Rescuing Socrates”
“In this rousing story, [Roosevelt] Montás concentrates on four particular ‘great authors’ that embody and encapsulate the human condition who shaped him: Saint Augustine, Plato, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi.”
Dante’s Divine Valentine
“Love is the central theme of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy. It is from love that new life begins. It is in love that life is sustained and made pleasant.”
Review: Arnold Weinstein’s “The Lives of Literature”
“His culminating chapter is a love letter from his heart of his life spent in literature, his life as it matured for himself, and he has given himself and his favorite books to us to discover afresh and anew.”
The Relevance of Tolkien’s Unfinished Work “The New Shadow”
“However, in his uncompleted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, as well as The Silmarillion, Tolkien presented a different vision of human nature, one that is more realistic and more concomitant with his Catholic upbringing.”
The Real Heroism of Odysseus
“Odysseus has before him the fantastical dream of every man: immortality and sex. He ultimately gives that up for mortality with his family.”
