I recently put Will Bardenwerper’s book Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America on my reading list. After reading Timothy Carney’s review of the book at the Washington Free Beacon I moved it to the […]
new books
On Frank Robinson, Earl Weaver, and the Baltimore Orioles
When I get the chance, I hope to read John W. Miller’s book The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented and Reinvented Baseball. The Washington Post is running a short excerpt. Here is a taste: Weaver changed how baseball […]
Historian Patrick Joyce on peasants: “At the same time as the living watch over the dead, the dead watch over and care for the living”
Check out Gus Mitchell’s review of Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World. A taste: Joyce explores five key relationships of this peasant world: to the society of the village or commune, to the family and […]
The tragedy of American communism
Maurice Isserman is the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History at Hamilton College. He is the author, most recently, of Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism. Over at The Guardian, Isserman writes: “I was struck by the mystery of […]
Robert Kagan on antiliberalism and Christian nationalism
Here is an excerpt from Kagan’s book Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart. The excerpt is published today at The Washington Post: Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he […]
“We are glad we are not them”: How Canadians are thinking about the potential collapse of American democracy
Over at Literary Review of Canada, Pulitzer prize-winning writer and McGill University professor David Marks Shribman reviews Rob Goodman’s Not Here: Why American Democracy is Eroding and How Canada Can Protect Itself. Here is a taste: It once was sufficient […]
Episode 122: “Springsteen, Joel, and the American Century”
In his new book Bridge & Tunnel Boys, historian Jim Cullen discusses how Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen represented what he calls “the metropolitan sound of the American century.” In this episode of the podcast, we talk with Cullen about how Joel […]
Yascha Mounk on identity politics
Mounk, a defender of liberal values and a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, is the author of Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Jonathan Kay interviews him at Quilette. Here is a taste: Jonathan Kay: […]
Is it time to make major changes to the U.S. Constitution?
The Atlantic is running an excerpt from a new book by Harvard political scientists Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt titled, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. They write: “Born of compromise and improvisation, the U.S. […]
The books John McPhee never wrote
92-year-old John McPhee talks to the Commonweal podcast about his creative non-fiction, “big” writing projects, his “desk drawer projects,” and his new book. Listen here.
Can one oppose abortion and still be a democratic socialist?
Check out Matt McManus‘s review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tryanny , Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty–and What to Do About It at Jacobin. As I noted in an earlier post, socialists really like this book despite Ahmari’s social conservatism. […]
A right-wing intellectual takes on capitalism. Some socialists are fine with it.
Some of you may know the name Sohrab Ahmari from his 2019 argument with David French over the meaning of conservatism. Since that debate, Amari has co-founded Compact, a journal critical of liberalism of both the left and the right […]
Episode 115: “Evangelicalism: Its Metaphors and Stories”
What is American evangelicalism? In her new book The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior, one of the most careful observers of, and participants in, evangelical life, analyzes the literature, art, and popular culture that has surrounded the movement and unpacks some of […]
“America’s commitment to independence shaped how Americans utilized the Bible from the very beginning.”
When you hear presidential candidates like Tim Scott and Mike Pence quote the Bible on the campaign trail for the purposes of advancing their political agendas, please realize that this is not a new thing. Here is a taste of […]
MacIntyre vs. Rorty: The two sides of liberalism
Over at The Nation cultural critic George Scialabba reviews a new biography of Catholic moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (Chris Shannon reviewed it for Current here) and a collection of essays by political philosopher Richard Rorty. Here is a taste: Fifty […]
“The Left is more likely…to hold men responsible for their own problems and advise them to purge themselves of their ‘toxic masculinity.'”
Over at Commonweal, Brendan Ruberry reviews Richard V. Reeves’s book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Here is a taste: “…today, around the industrialized world, men seem […]
Check out Current‘s new “Reviews” section
We publish a lot of book reviews in Current features section. For those of you who love books and ideas that come from books, we have gathered all of our reviews and placed them under the “Reviews” tag above. Enjoy! […]
Have cars made our lives more dangerous and less democratic?
Over at Jacobin, Jacob Sugarman reviews Daniel Knowles’s book Carmaggedon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It. Here is a taste: On February 3, a Norfolk Southern train approximately 150 cars long derailed near the town of East […]
Two divergent explanations of Southern inequality
Over at Dissent, political scientist Jared Loggins reviews Adolph Reed’s The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives and Imani Perry’s South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation. (See my review of […]
Episode 109: “The Voice and Faith of Sojourner Truth”
In this episode we talk with historian and biographer Nancy Koester about her new book on nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth. Our discussion focuses on Truth’s lifelong pursuit of a just society, a deeper knowledge of God, and […]