“On the basis of viscerality alone, Gran Turismo is worth the price of admission for the two-hour cruise along.”
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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
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Category: Criticism
With Action, Gran Turismo Crosses the Finish Line. With Drama, Not So Much
Mark Goldblatt and the Art of Persuasion
“I cannot argue with his characterization of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes as a ‘triumvirate of stooges,’ but with me, he is preaching to the choir. How will he convince the postmodernists?”
Review: “Yellowface” by R.F. Kuang
“Yellowface has its strengths. Kuang is terrific when parodying the loathsome impulses of social media and book reviewers. She also offers wisdom about the publishing industry and the inner life of a writer.”
Should You Read the Same Book Twice?
“Amid this exchange about the importance of recentering the essential literature of our history, I posed to Mac Donald a question that has been on my mind since my days as a student at The Haverford School: Should one make a habit of reading the same book twice?”
A Once Unnecessary Reminder: Criticism Produces Good Works
“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…”
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.”
