Does the Way of Improvement Lead Home?
First, let me extend my greetings to the readers of the Front Porch Republic. I have been following conversations here at FPR since...
I Did Taste!
Under consideration: Michael Pollan, The Omnivor's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Penguin (2006), 464 pages; and In Defense of Food: An Eater's...
Reasoning about Stories
Devon, PA. Here is something for you that no one will dispute: all complaints about modernity, including those that fit under the rubric of...
The Rediscovery of Agriculture?
RINGOES, NJ. Recently, a friend and I visited Polyface Farm outside Staunton, Virginia. Polyface is owned and operated by Joel Salatin, whose parents...
Mr. Herbert’s Sunday Morning Service
Devon, PA. Most people, agrarian or otherwise, do not read poetry anymore. Ours is not merely a forgetful culture, but one that has long...
It was 20 Years Ago Today…Edward Abbey Lives!
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY--Edward Abbey died twenty years ago today. A product of the perfectly named Home, Pennsylvania, son of the conjugation of a Woman’s...
Douthat to the Times
Phoenix, Arizona. Catapulted by his inclusion on the exclusive FPR blogroll, Ross Douthat has been tabbed as a new opinion columnist for the New...
A Note on Immigration
South Bend, IN. Back here, in the city where the St. Joseph River takes her perpetual turn for the worse, my family and I...
Time-Travel Economics with Jonathan Swift
Rock Island, Illlinois.
It’s a little-known fact that many of our finest writers owned time machines and paid frequent visits to the future. Furious John...
Last Will and Sacrament
PHOENIX, ARIZONA. I don’t think that many reviews have yet appeared, but John Lukacs has just published another memoir, titled Last Rites. Patrick Allitt has an appreciative, but not uncritical, review (subscribers only) in the latest American Conservative. He is right that this volume is not, for a variety of reasons, as “scintillating” as Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990). But then, Confessions truly is scintillating. It’s one of the finest American memoirs of the twentieth century. What makes it so fine is that it is not simply American. It is also deeply Pennsylvanian. In a state blessed with many more great quarterbacks than great writers, the Hungarian-born, British-educated Lukacs can lay claim to have evoked the character of the southeastern corner of the state as well as anyone ever has. (In this respect, add to Lukacs’s Pennsylvania oeuvre his Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines and certain sections of A Thread of Years, one of the most memorable books I have ever read.)