RINGOES, NJ. In the fall of 2008, Americans were confronted with frightening news. The financial world was, the experts warned, teetering on the brink of disaster. Politicians from both parties grimly intoned that what was at stake was “our...
ALEXANDRIA, VA. Names are important, and few can be more significant than what a new publication calls itself. Perhaps at first greeting the name will give pause, causing the new reader to think momentarily about what it means,...
PHOENIX, ARIZONA. I don’t think that many reviews have yet appeared, but John Lukacs has just published another memoir, titled Last Rites. Patrick Allitt has an appreciative, but not uncritical, review (subscribers only) in the latest American Conservative. He is right that this volume is not, for a variety of reasons, as “scintillating” as Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990). But then, Confessions truly is scintillating. It’s one of the finest American memoirs of the twentieth century. What makes it so fine is that it is not simply American. It is also deeply Pennsylvanian. In a state blessed with many more great quarterbacks than great writers, the Hungarian-born, British-educated Lukacs can lay claim to have evoked the character of the southeastern corner of the state as well as anyone ever has. (In this respect, add to Lukacs’s Pennsylvania oeuvre his Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines and certain sections of A Thread of Years, one of the most memorable books I have ever read.)
DALLAS, TX. I am bemused, appalled, and fascinated -- more or less at the same time -- by the foofarah over Rush Limbaugh's CPAC speech. His version of conservatism is popular, of course, but is not recognizable as any...
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
E.D. Kain had a fine quote from Wendell Berry that provides a good definition of community to start any discussion of place and limits:
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and...
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NEW YORK. March came in like a frigid lamb, and even though the temperature never did climb out of the teens the snowless patch in our backyard was large enough for my daughter and I to play...