“Despite the book’s homage to Friedrich Schiller via its title, we get nothing even remotely reminiscent of the profound intellectual mind meld between him and his great friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.”
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Tag: book review
Confessions of a Beautiful Soul
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.”
Review: “Uncommon Wrath” by Josiah Osgood
“[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.”
On Literary Science and the Bounds of Knowledge
“But philistinism is not limited to the arts. I believe that those who cannot appreciate the wondrous beauty of the real world as revealed by science are philistines, too.”
Review: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left” by Matt Johnson
“[Matt] Johnson believes that by adopting [Christopher] Hitchens’s approach—his allergy to party politics, his hatred of racism and nationalism, his emphasis on pluralism and humanism—the contemporary left will not just benefit at the ballot box but will also benefit morally and intellectually.”
Review: “The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective” by Michael Walzer
“Reading between the lines, we learn in fact that [Michael] Walzer believes that the Right, wrong in its continuing adherence to capitalism, but correct in its eschewal of intellectual fashion, currently has a monopoly on political wisdom.”
Review: Spencer Klavan’s “How To Save The West”
“Being a classicist and student of Greek philosophy, Klavan turns to his education to solve these philosophical dilemmas.”
Review: Waller Newell’s “Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger”
“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.”
Review: Carl Trueman’s “Strange New World”
“It bears repeating that this is a very good book. Trueman performs a thorough but concise excavation of the intellectual, philosophical, and metaphysical currents that he sees as moving below the crashing waves of our present cultural storm.”
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.”
The Value in Reading Byung-Chul Han
“Han occupies a somewhat unique position in today’s world that defies typical Right-Left categorization. This is partly because of Han’s bridging of multiple worlds: East and West; art and philosophy; theology and politics.”
Review: Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good”
“For Labour forgot that life involves loss and tragedy. It forgot that ‘human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning.'”
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: Slavoj Žižek’s “Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed”
“Combining inanity with compelling anecdote, idiocy with sensible instruction, Žižek addresses himself to the ‘mess we’re in.'”
Review: “People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn
“All of this is captured in twelve essays in novelist Dara Horn’s powerful and coruscating book on why people still love dead Jews over living Jews. It is a book that shreds modern piety and sophistry in equal measure.”
