My piece on Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley, from the Fall 2008 Intercollegiate Review is now on-line at ISI’s web journal, First Principles.
For my take on the Old Right leaning of WFB Jr’s father, Will Buckley, see my review of a few months back of Reid Buckley’s An American Family. And for more on the [...]
Also newly in print, in the election special issue of Reason (otherwise known as the November 2008 issue), is my review of Grand New Party, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam.The boy wonders of The Atlantic make their case for “neoconservatism with a human face in action,” to which I say, “oh, hell no!”
Grand [...]
I have reviews in two journals out now: the Fall 2008 issue of The Intercollegiate Review (wherein I cover the late William F. Buckley’s Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater) and the out-now-or-soon-to-be issue of the University Bookman, guest edited by Bill Kauffman. My article in the latter is a review of Jim Reed, Senatorial Immortal, [...]
No, that’s not a new dating site for seniors. It’s just my way of calling attention to the addition of some of my older article (circa 2007) to The American Conservative’s public archives. I’m not sure exactly which pieces hadn’t been up before, but I’m pretty sure these have just been added:
“Ambivalent Prophet of Capitalism” [...]
Bill Kauffman describes a boorish young conservative (in his novel, Every Man a King, p. 21):
He was only twenty-four when John Huey met him, yet Bertram’s dress suggested a foppish Victorian. He was seldom without a bowler atop his head, cocked a shade to the right because, he avowed, “Albert Jay Nock wore it just [...]
My review of Reid Buckley’s history of his clan, An American Family: The Buckleys, is now on-line. I knew that William F. Buckley Sr. was very much a noninterventionist and man of the Old Right, but I didn’t know just how true that was until I read Reid’s book, which I highly recommend.
At some [...]
At Taki’s Magazine, Austin Bramwell asks some questions that the Philadelphia Society will never answer, the best one being the piece’s title, “Is the Conservative Movement Worth Conserving?” Although Austin’s own views are not hard to discern, his questions ought to be approached with an open mind. Take this one:
• The Failure of the Canon: [...]
I’m on a Christopher Buckley binge at the moment: read Florence of Arabia earlier this week; now I’m on Little Green Men. Flo only takes an afternoon or so, and it’s excellent. Consider this passage about American opinion regarding a crisis in the Middle East:
There were those who urged caution, and those who urged that [...]
In September, Dissident Books is bringing out a new edition of Mencken’s classic Notes on Democracy:
H. L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist and critic, wrote Notes on Democracy more than eighty years ago. His era—the years of World War I, Prohibition, and the Scopes trial—was strikingly like our own. Notes isn’t just a provocative and funny [...]
LRC links to this worthy review of The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal. Like reviewer Louis Bayard, I too prefer Vidal’s essays to his novels, as good as the latter are (in fact, I’ve been meaning for a few days now to hit Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy of Washington DC). I [...]