The Nightstand

What Emba most successfully conveys throughout the entirety of her brief book is an awareness that we are never “our own.” This is certainly right, but she does not go far enough in revealing just how radical this interdependence is, and why it warrants placing sex back within the context of marriage and family-building. While Rethinking Sex speaks to an audience fed up with sexual disappointment, it omits family and marriage as forms of belonging and responsibility that stem from our sexuality.

If “church” is the body of Christ in its local manifestation, where each and every member is connected to one another and everyone knows each other’s names and stories, have cried together and laughed together, worshipped together, served together, prayed together, argued together, eaten together, and attended each other’s family funerals, then church becomes a place and community that is life-transformative in the manner that Grothe advocates.

It is perhaps that personal search for contentment that makes this book a notable contribution to the literature on the American racial problem: Milliner’s “penitent Midwest regionalism” is first of all an attempt to heal within himself the disease and discontentment produced in those of us who have been told that what matters about us is that we are white.

Harvard Law School produces many of our future rulers, and it may be better for us if aspiring federal administrators learn from Vermeule at least the presumptive desirability of honoring local institutions. Yet Vermeule would only be teaching them a carefully-regulated localism whose contours would be subject to the decisions of the federal administrative state.

Perhaps this, above all, is the work of nature writing: to bring the wild and the domestic together and to reveal the mystery at the heart of both. That Springer’s book consistently does this is enough to commend it as a constructive entry in this vexed genre.

Aaron Weinacht’s book is a needed corrective to the public misperception of Ayn Rand as radical capitalist. She was, first and foremost, a radical nihilist. Insofar as Rand embraced capitalism, it was secondary to her axiomatic nihilism embodied best in John Galt.

Attunement, attachment, engagement, and identification are all absolutely necessary for properly considering artworks of all kinds. However, I struggle to identify the application of Felski's argument. Perhaps it is because, as a high school teacher in a classical school, I feel free to assert, identify, and argue without invoking a French theorist to support me.

A Good Party, Tara Isabella Burton suggests, is “a place where bonds of friendship, fostered in a spirit of both charity and joy, serve as the building blocks for communal life overall.” With 52 contributors filling almost 500 pages, we’re speaking of something close to a block party, one at which we run into some familiar faces, meet a number of wonderful new people, and even glimpse a few Almost Famous People.

To whatever extent I imposed a narrative on experience, it was only because experience first imposed it upon me.

Sinha’s writing should appeal to multiple audiences, from those disillusioned with modern urbanity to young mothers to thoughtful people concerned with the persistent presence of evil in our times. The City Mother has that rare quality of providing an immersive narrative experience that also transcends its particularities to link them to universal questions of how we can find our way in the world.