The Nightstand

"What we have for neighbors out here is–well–more interesting. We have way more folks who are just themselves and nobody else.”

We might not use the word “genius” in all these contexts, but the mystery is the same. Where did this exceptional ability come from? Is it just another trait like brown eyes or curly hair? We know only that this aptitude defies our disciplines and formulas and couldn’t have been foreseen. Bestowed upon otherwise ordinary people, genius singles them out in one salient regard. It’s a gift that the wise don’t take for granted, a revelation that might beckon each time we visit a gallery, see a movie, attend a concert, open a book.

For readers exhausted by the seemingly intractable erosion of society by powerful forces, Perzanowski, has, thankfully, included many tales of heroic and insurgent successes sure to inspire readers, and his treatment of cultural history related to planned obsolescence, consumerism, and repair makes for an intriguing story with plenty of sociological insights that will improve its readers’ self-understanding.

As Sarah Orne Jewett knew, "everyday tasks” and the celebrations they engender are the condition upon which many other arts rest, including poetry.

In sum, Finding a New Midwestern History is an exemplary compilation of historical interpretations both renewed and new. The enthusiasms of Garland, Wright, and Turner—registered a century and a quarter ago—have found compelling new voices, testifying to the Midwest’s remarkable past, and present.

Why Liberalism Failed was a good book, but Regime Change is a better one, and I think will be recognized as such—as well as one that will gain notoriety in a way that the earlier, more academic book mostly did not.

Hooten Wilson draws on theological as well as literary works to demonstrate various approaches to a text, leading to the contemplative mode, which she asserts should be “the end of all our reading.”

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.

These essays unite history, philosophy, and social commentary to say something about the ebb and flow of ideas which shape post-modern accounts of who we are and where we came from.

Undergirding Leacock's work was not a desire to restore a previous version of Canada, but to preserve the gifts God had given: the best traditions of the past, the communities in which we live, the surrounding creation, and the dignity of man.