Chater, a widely published essayist, gives us an impressionistic portrait of a family immersed in extreme Catholic traditionalism. Written from the perspec-tive of the child and adolescent, Chater is successful in letting readers... Read More

When a fiction writer concocts a plot in which the fate of the world is at stake, the reader becomes a confederate, suspending belief in the expectation that plenty of fun will result. The author has an obligation as well: He or she... Read More

Rights and Racism: Even as Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan was defending Plessy vs. Ferguson, he couldn’t stomach extending civil rights for everyone. “There is a race so different from our own,” he wrote in the landmark... Read More

For two years now, Republicans have been labeling Barack Obama a liberal, and often a “far left” liberal. Paul Street’s critique of the Democratic presidential frontrunner comes not from the right but from the progressive left.... Read More

Former officials of the Bush administration are guilty of war crimes because their aggressive interrogation techniques are torture, as defined in the Geneva Conventions and other legal statutes, the author claims. Michael Ratner,... Read More

Those far-sighted enough to have snapped up Overlook Press’s 2005 re-issue of the *Mortdecai Trilogy—*Kyril Bonfiglioli’s powerfully comedic, high-octane send-ups of the bon-viveur-cum-sleuth detective story—may have hoped that... Read More

At some time in life one may be called, by feelings too strong to deny, to pass time in solitude. Author Robert Kull first felt this call as a young man in his twenties who was then living the “macho” life of a logger on the west... Read More

The heroine of Elizabeth Maguire’s historical novel, Constance Fenimore Woolson, points out to her new friend Henry James that the “dilemma of modern female life” is the “freedom to think, to desire, but not the freedom to... Read More