Bookshelf

St. Augustines Press, 2022

“Cultural instructions.” Everyone who has handled a package of seedlings has encountered that enigmatic advisory. This much water and that much sun, certain tips about fertilizer, soil, and drainage. Planting one sort of flower nearby keeps the bugs away but proximity to another sort makes bad things happen. Young shoots might need stakes, and watch out for beetles, weeds, and unseasonable frosts. It’s a complicated business.

But at least since Cicero introduced the term cultura animi (“cultivation of the mind or spirit”), such “cultural instructions” have applied as much to the realm of civilization as to horticulture. In this wide-ranging investigation into the vicissitudes of culture in the twenty-first century, the distinguished critic Roger Kimball traces the deep filiations between cultivation as a spiritual enterprise and the prerequisites of political freedom. Drawing on figures as various as James Burnham, Richard Weaver, G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, Friedrich von Hayek, and Leszek Kolakowski, Kimball traces the interconnections between what he calls the fortunes of permanence and such ambassadors of anarchy as relativism, multiculturalism, and the socialist-utopian imperative.

With his signature blend of wit and erudition, Kimball deftly draws on the resources of art, literature, and political philosophy to illuminate some of the wrong turns and dead ends our culture has recently pursued, while also outlining some of the simple if overlooked alternatives to the various tyrannies masquerading as liberation we have again and again fallen prey to. This rich, rewarding, and intelligent volume bristles with insights into what the nineteenth-century novelist Anthony Trollope called “The Way We Live Now.”

Partly an exercise in cultural pathology, The Fortunes of Permanence is also a forward-looking effort of cultural recuperation. It promises to be essential reading for anyone concerned about the direction of Western culture in an age of anti-Western animus and destructive multicultural fantasy.

Plaudits for Fortunes of Permanence: Claremont Review of Books, The Imaginative Conservative

Encounter Books, 2022

At least since Oedipus met King Laius on the road from Delphi to Thebes, the image of a crossroads has signaled a dramatic and morally fraught turning point. It was with this cargo of significance in mind that The New Criterion published a special series of essays on “Western Civilization at the Crossroads” during its fortieth-anniversary season. Featuring contributions by Conrad Black, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Andrew Roberts, and other luminaries, this book collects the ten special essays to assess where Western civilization is now, and where it’s going.

Encounter Books, 2021

On the occasion of its fortieth anniversary, The New Criterion has brought together a plump chrestomathy of essays demonstrating its range and acuity as America’s foremost review of culture and the arts. With contributions by Bruce Bawer, Anthony Daniels, Denis Donoghue, Joseph Epstein, John Steele Gordon, Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Hill, Donald Kagan, Roger Kimball, Heather Mac Donald, Myron Magnet, Andrew C. McCarthy, David Pryce-Jones, Andrew Roberts, Alexander McCall Smith, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Keith Windschuttle, and many others, this collection of fifty essays brings you the best of the best: incisive cultural criticism, scintillating historical analysis, and robust commentary about the way we live now. Edited by Roger Kimball, this spiritual Baedeker is a timely repository of timeless writing about the figures, controversies, and challenges that define our life in the 2020s.

Encounter Books, 2020

The populist phenomenon is often identified with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. But the political, moral, and social realities for which Trump was a symbol both predated his candidacy and achieved independent fulfillment in countries as disparate as the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Brazil.

At the center of the populist challenge, this volume proposes, are two questions. The first revolves around the question of sovereignty: who governs a country? This question is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives and has been posed with increasing urgency as the bureaucratic burden of what has come to be called the administrative state has intruded more and more forcefully upon the political and social life of Western democracies.

The second key question, one related to the issue of sovereignty, concerns what Lincoln called “public sentiment”: the widespread, almost taken-for-granted yet nonetheless palpable affirmation by a people of their national identity. The erosion of national sovereignty to which populism is a response has been accompanied by an erosion of that shared national consensus. Increasingly, the traditional pillars of this consensus―the binding forces of family, religion, civic duty, and patriotic filiation―have faltered before the blandishments of transnational progressivism.

The debate sparked by these problems has turned on a number of high-profile issues which this volume seeks to address, including immigration, free trade, foreign policy, religious freedom, and the question of citizenship.

Encounter Books, 2017

The rise of populist movements across the political spectrum poses a vital question: what role should populism play in modern democracy? In ten trenchant essays, the writers of The New Criterion examine the perils and promises of populism in Vox Populi, a new collection that marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of this critical journal.

Routledge, 2017

This volume contains nearly all the criticism that Alexander Coleman wrote for The New Criterion between 1994 and 2003. A specialist in Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American literature, Coleman was also a superb essayist on music, and his wide erudition, as revealed in these writings, demonstrates an easy mastery of the entire modernist tradition. Diversions and Animadversions are divided into three parts. The first contains Coleman’s literary essays including a lengthy piece on Eba de Quieros, the great master of Portuguese realism, and shorter pieces on the Argentinian writer and Borges disciple, Adolfo Bioy Casares, as well as a review of the most recent translation of the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. Coleman’s greatest passion, however, was for music, and part two contains essays, concert and book reviews, and reports on the cultural situation of music. Among the subjects examined here are the operas of Schoenberg, Berg, Richard Strauss, the recently published letters of Toscanini, the music criticism of Virgil Thomson, the fluctuating critical reputation of Jean Sibelius, and the authentic performance practice movement, along with considerations of such instrumentalists as Sviatoslav Richter and Alicia de Larrocha. The book concludes with Coleman’s travel writings, which are both evocative mood pieces and incisive social and political commentary. Graced with personal appreciations by Roger Kimball and Denis Donoghue, this volume encapsulates the work of a writer of rare wit, capacious learning, and eager, if gently ironical, curiosity.

Encounter Books, 2012

We are living in an age of unprecedented upheaval. The future of Western culture is uncertain. America’s economic and political vitality are more fragile than ever. The preservation of tradition is far from guaranteed.

Many have observed that we are living through a world historical moment of which Hegel spoke: a time when many of the traditional assumptions about the shape and future of culture are suddenly in play. As The New Criterion embarks on its fourth decade of publication, the magazine commemorates its commitment to the civilizing values of informed criticism with the publication of Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval.

Compiling the writings of some of the greatest essayists of our time, Future Tense examines this pivotal period through a variety of lenses. Beginning with a meditation on memorials after the 9/11 attacks (Michael J. Lewis), the essays address patriotism in relation to Pericles (Victor Davis Hanson), twenty-first century American pride and leadership (Andrew Roberts), the future of religion in America (David Bentley Hart), and the unwinding of the welfare state (Kevin D. Williamson). Continuing this arc, pieces examine self-knowledge and modern technology (Anthony Daniels), the cultural capital of museums (James Panero), and the difficulties of making law in the modern world (Andrew C. McCarthy). In its penultimate essay, the book explores the possibility of a forthcoming political revolution (James Piereson), then closes with a reflection of culture’s role in the economy of life and the fragility of civilization (Roger Kimball).

Taken together, these prominent writers demonstrate an acute understanding of the value of Western thought as well as the challenges it faces. Future Tense is an engaging discourse on the prospects of society and an important collection for anyone concerned with the longevity of traditional culture.

Encounter Books, 2012

The ideas and policies that are percolating down from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill increased government intervention, calls to spread the wealth around,” onerous regulations, and bailouts for all are not new. We’ve been down this road before. We know where it leads. It is that forlorn byway that Friedrich von Hayek called the Road to Serfdom.

The good news is we don’t have to go down that road again. Resurrecting 18th-century style pamphleteering, Encounter Broadsides provide the intellectual ammunition for the battle over America’s future. From the folly of Obamacare, to the politicization of the Justice Department, or disastrous efforts to nationalize our education system, each Encounter Broadside assaults a new tentacle of the rising statism. Now, for the first time, The New Leviathan collects these salvos in one essential handbook.

The New Leviathan is edited by Roger Kimball with contributions from John R. Bolton, Daniel DiSalvo, Richard A. Epstein, Peter Ferrara, John Fund, Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew C. McCarthy, Betsy McCaughey, Stephen Moore, Michael B. Mukasey, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Rich Trzupek, and Kevin D. Williamson. Together, they make the definitive case for liberty and democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment.

Ivan R. Dee, 2008

Since Tenured Radicals first appeared in 1990, it has achieved a stature as the leading critique of the ways in which the humanities are now taught and studied at American universities. Trenchant and witty, it lays bare the sham of what now passes for serious academic pursuit in too many circles. In this new edition, completely reset, Roger Kimball has brought the text up to date and has added a new Introduction. Those who have never read Tenured Radicals are in for a treat; others may find a second reading worth their while.

Ivan R. Dee, 2007

Drawn from twenty-five years of the magazine, this abundant collection contains a generous sampling of the very best writing from The New Criterion, featuring the judgments of our generation’s most astute and entertaining observers.