Finding Arcadia: The Garden in the Cosmos in Latin Literature
Paul Krause examines the politics of Latin literature and discovers a desire for peace and joy, a peace and joy found in an intimate environment of beauty which the poets, even theologians, described as a garden. But the race to Arcadia runs through strife, war, and murder.
A Wayfinding Approach to Freedom from Sebastian Junger
Elizabeth Stice reviews Sebastian Junger's new book, Freedom. The new book is a product of a roughly 400-mile hike Junger took with other men processing their war experiences. Junger's approach to freedom is based in reality and, as a result, speaks to real life.
Anyone Living Anywhere: The Challenge of My Vertical Neighborhood
Milton Friesen reviews My Vertical Neighbourhood, Linda’s McGibbon’s xperience as a newcomer to a high-rise condo in Toronto. She actively explores what it means to be a neighbour in the third dimension, and challenges us to acknowledge that mutuality matters.
Sport for the Sake of Success: A Review of Little Platoons
Feeney’s book is a helpful antidote to the “go to college at any cost” mindset. But more importantly, it examines how this mindset can corrupt the forms of association that allow our communities to thrive and the humans within those communities to flourish.
Clarkson’s Farm, a Folly Worth Watching
By the end of season one of Clarkson's Farm, Clarkson is still not an expert on anything farming related, but he is learning all the time, including about the area where he lives and how to love it well.
The Unreproducible Society
We justify our choices as the price of innovation, of progress, of efficiency. We tell ourselves we can’t afford to do anything else. We even tell ourselves it’s for the children. And so we bankrupt our posterity so we can eat, drink, and be merry. It’s a nice life for those who get to live it, but it’s not reproducible.
“Magically Turning White”: A Family Story of Slavery, Racism, and Redemption
Mark Clavier describes coming to terms with the fact that he is a white Southerner descended from enslaved Africans who subsequently became slave-owners. Reflecting on an ancestry containing triumph and shame, he discovers how closely the commendable and corrupt can be intertwined.
Living In the Myth: A Review of Jason Stacy’s Spoon...
Benjamin Myers reviews Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy. Stacey explores the changing and contested myth of the midwestern small town, particularly in relation to Masters’s famous Spoon River Anthology. In Spoon River and its echoes throughout literary and popular culture, innocence struggles with cynicism, tradition with modernity, and a persistent populism with a perpetual elite.
“We Hide behind the Tomatoes”: A Review of On Common Ground
Community Land Trusts, at their best, are less about development and more about stewardship, creating just places for the long-term. CLTs are thus the ultimate preservationists, the developer/landowner who never abandons the property.
Life and Death in the Forest: A Review of Finding the...
Simard concludes that all of the natural world is interconnected and her conclusion is particularly poignant as she points out that the hard-won insight of her decades of research is nothing more than a “scientific” stamp of approval on the wisdom of both ancient indigenous practices and 19th and early 20th century logging and harvesting practices.