A famous literary author creates a very weird and paint-by-numbers comic/graphic novel. Well done illustrations can’t save this one.
Continue readingAngle Catbird (Volume 1) by Margaret Atwood (Author), Johnnie Christmas (Illustrator
The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid through Mississippi by Timothy B. Smith
I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on the Civil War, but periodically I am surprised by an event that I have not read about. This is the case with Timothy Smith’s The Real Horse Soldiers. The book is a great narrative and analysis of the Union raid led by Colonel Benjamin Grierson. Smith describes the strategic… Continue reading
Layover by David Bell
I will admit to being a fickle reader these days. My life has been rather crazy at the last four months or so, more anon on that perhaps, and so my mood seems to change regularly. Sometimes I am reading serious nonfiction, sometimes literary fiction but at other times what I really need is something… Continue reading
Where the post-liberals have a point is that humans are happiest in communities, families and institutions of faith. The solution to the culture wars is to allow more freedom for these “little platoons” of civil society from which people draw a sense of meaning and belonging. If Sacramento wants Drag Queen Story Hour, so be it. If some other community holds a socially conservative version of the same, that’s fine too.
What America needs is less talk of national unity — from the left or the right — and more freedom to let people live the way they want to live, not just as individuals, but as members of local communities. We don’t need to move past liberalism, we need to return to it.
Jonah Goldberg
Instead of the virtues of classical republicanism, the romance of nationalism, the ructions of democracy, many modern liberals give us a vision of an Open Society that is informed by the dreams of Communism itself, a withering away of nationality, religions, social distinctions, and even the family that occurs underneath the tutelage of liberal democratic capitalism rather than a Communist party. That is why, so often, the legal suppressions aimed at Christianity are aimed at things like the principled refusal to profit from one’s labor. None of these cases involve the systematic and conspiratorial deprivation of goods, as Jim Crow did. What offends the modern liberal is something else. The mere assertion of a higher good beyond the Open Society, and beyond ourselves, something higher than profit, is itself counted as an injury, as treasonous.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
Lucretia and the Kroons by Victor LaValle
A fantastical novella about a young girl’s journey into a dark netherworld to find her missing best friend. But is it a “dazzlingly imaginative adventure story and moving exploration of the power of friendship and the terror of loss” as the publisher claims?
Continue readingBenice: An Adventure of Love and Friendship by Metin Karayaka
A middle-grade bedtime storybook written and illustrated in the tradition of classics. While adventures teach boys and girls importance of family and friendship in their lives, adults will love the good lessons about not making the wrong decisions when life offers challenges.”
Continue readingHolding the Line on the River of Death: Union Mounted Forces at Chickamauga, September 18, 1863 by Eric J. Wittenberg
My favorite Civil War author, Eric J. Wittenberg, has recently written a book on the Union mounted force’s delaying action on September 18, 1863 at Chickamauga in Holding the Line on the River of Death. Wittenberg is my favorite author because he details the actions of individual units, but also gives a great overview of… Continue reading
Quick Take: One Fatal Mistake by Tom Hunt
It turned out to be the fast paced thriller I was looking for but I was left cold by the ending.
Everything went barreling toward a climax and then it just kind of ended.