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1 month ago | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Paul Gottfried |Vladimir Golstein |Henry Olsen |Gary Saul Morson
Download Subscriber Only Subscribe A distinguished presbyterian theologian and incisive critic of the modern cult of the individual, Carl R. Trueman devotes his latest book, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, to the Frankfurt School and the rise of critical theory.
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1 month ago | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Gary Saul Morson |Anthony Esolen |Henry Olsen
Download Subscriber Only Subscribe “We shall know nothing,” wrote Albert Camus, “until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men.” Andrew Klavan cites this comment in his splendid new book, The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. The kingdom of Cain is the world in which humanity has dwelled since Adam and Eve’s eldest son, the first person born after the fall, committed the first murder. Violent crime has haunted us ever since.
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1 month ago | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Anthony Esolen |Paul Gottfried |Gary Saul Morson
Download Subscriber Only Subscribe Death holds the ultimate mystery for human beings, and consequently the question how best to live presents one with a darkness hardly less difficult to fathom. A good death is of course the fitting end to a good life—though Christians believe that deathbed conversion can absolve one of a life badly spent, as in Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
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1 month ago | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Daniel Mahoney |Gary Saul Morson |Anthony Esolen |Martha Bayles
Download Subscriber Only Subscribe Winston S. Churchill will remain worthy of study and admiration wherever true greatness is celebrated.
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1 month ago | 
claremontreviewofbooks.com | Victor Davis Hanson |Martha Bayles |Gary Saul Morson |Luke Foster
Download Subscriber Only Subscribe As World War II raged in Europe, Douglas MacArthur, perhaps the best known and most decorated American general of his era, was called out of retirement at age 61 to command all United States Army Forces in the Far East. He was eager to return to Army headquarters in the Philippines, where he had earlier in retirement overseen the creation of the islands’ defenses.
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1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Gary Saul Morson
The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn captured in fiction the events that led to the Bolshevik revolution. The great British historian Herbert Butterfield cautioned against the temptation to tell a neat story about historical events or discover “an unfolding logic” in them.
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2 months ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Heather Mac Donald |Gary Saul Morson |Thomas Philbrick
Few cities can rival Vienna’s list of cultural and artistic luminaries. The thinkers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Menger, Viktor Frankl, Friederich Hayek, and Sigmund Freud were all Viennese. So were the writers Stefan Zweig, Ignaz Castelli, and Arthur Schnitzler. And then, of course, there are Vienna’s composers: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, the Strausses (all three of them), Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, among others.
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2 months ago | 
newcriterion.com | Heather Mac Donald |Gary Saul Morson |Douglas Murray |David Gress
Recent stories of note:“Vargas Llosa Stood for Freedom Against the Nationalist Tide”Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal“I learned to read at the age of five,” said Mario Vargas Llosa upon accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. “It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me.” The Peruvian novelist, essayist, and politician died last Sunday at the age of eighty-nine, and his learning to read doubtless stands as an important event for the rest of the world, too.
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2 months ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
Last night, the Philadelphia Orchestra played the Symphony No. 6 in A minor of Gustav Mahler. The venue: Carnegie Hall. The conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is the orchestra’s music director, as well as the music director of the Metropolitan Opera. What a double-job. Maestro Nézet-Séguin has far surpassed Noah (the tennis star of the ’80s) as the world’s most celebrated Yannick. The Mahler Sixth takes about an hour and twenty minutes to play. It was the sole work on last night’s program.
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2 months ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
To measure the reach of postcolonial theory, consider the Metropolitan Opera’s new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, which debuted on December 31, 2024, and runs through May 9. As the opera’s gossamer prelude rises from the orchestra, a man in a pith helmet and safari suit descends on a cable from the house’s stratospheric proscenium, shining a spotlight through the smoky atmosphere.
