What We’re Reading

Kate Cooper, Queens of a Fallen World. Kate Cooper, one of the best classicists currently living (and former student of the eminent Peter Brown), has just published a wonderful study of Augustine’s Confessions with a twist: a focus on the four women who feature prominently in the narrative. By looking at the lives of Empress Justina, Monica, and “Tacita” (the heiress that Augustine was arranged to marry) and “Una” (“the only woman I ever loved”), Cooper brings to life how these women shaped Augustine’s own life and thought. Una (the name given to Augustine’s unnamed love by Garry Willis and solidified by James J. O’Donnell), especially, features as the prominent heroine she was to Augustine. Anyone who has a love for Augustine, the late Roman Empire in the west, and new ways to read Augustine’s Confessions (and Augustine’s other writings) will be superbly pleased with Kate Cooper’s newest book.

~ Paul Krause

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. If you’ve heard buzzwords like decolonizing the curriculum, heteronormativity, and white privilege tossed around and are wondering where they came from, you might be interested in a book tracing the academic history of Theory in all its forms, which is exactly what this book does. The title might be misleading if you think the tone of the book is casual or polemical – in fact, it’s written and researched by scholars who are explicit about the argument they are making, but who are also interested in a historical analysis. Pluckrose and Lindsay connect modern Critical Race Theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and intersectional feminism (among others) to the postmodernism of Foucault and Derrida, and they argue that this has resulted in poor scholarship and activism intruding where it should not. The antidote, they argue, is liberalism. For me, this book was especially interesting as a compendium of research, helping a layperson wade through complex and abstruse theories and see how they connect to each other. For instance, I didn’t realize how closely intersectional feminism was tied to queer theory. In any case, because of the research and nuanced thinking it contains, I would recommend this book regardless of whether you agree or disagree with its slightly provocative title.

~ Sarah Chew

Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times (Book I). It is always a pleasure to read one of Churchill’s books, given his unique style, meticulous prose and the utter lack of any pretentious claims to “objectivity,” “neutrality” or “academic rigour.” These perceived “defects” are even more pronounced in this magnum opus about his esteemed ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, a man of extraordinary ability who “amid all the chance and baffling incidents of war produced victory with almost mechanical certainty.”  For Churchill, England’s hero of the War of the Spanish succession should rightly be named with Hannibal, Ceasar and Napoleon.

The book is written in an accessible style, almost Orwellian (in the good sense of the word), with a clear bias in favour of Anglo-Saxon over Romance vocabulary. Both the prose and subject-matter are engaging, and make the book read like a historical novel, as opposed to a dry, unexciting, academic work plagued by an excess of footnotes.  But then, unlike most representatives of modern academia, Churchill had the passion, confidence and imagination to produce a work worthy of someone of Marlborough’s stature, without paying homage to lesser men and their petty considerations. It is no surprise Marlborough’s biography has been described by Leo Strauss as “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding, which should be a required reading for every student of political science.”  And so, this work shall endure, not just as a timeless work of history and biography, but, above all, as a testament to the greatness of the English language.

~ Filip Bakardzhiev

Jonathan Rausch, The Constitution of Knowledge. This is a book that touches a problem so enduring in modern times yet so often overlooked that its emergence leads one to rejoice at its timely arrival. Jonathan Rausch offers a cogent yet approachable analysis of the “epistemological problem” plaguing the modern age. The bias of philosophy originating with Plato is that people argue for the truth of their belief and debate their position against an opposing side. In questioning one’s opponents and, indeed, one’s own prejudices, a student may come face to face with his own ignorance and recognize the starting point for engaging with the truth is that old Socratic truth of admitting that I know nothing. But the modern age finds itself in extraordinary circumstances where people must first pose that there is such a thing as truth at all. How did we get here, and how do we move forward from this unfortunate position? Piercing, engaging, and timely, Rausch’s book offers illuminating points that speak to these questions.

~ Phillip Pinell

Sir Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. Sir Roger Scruton is one of the great thinkers of our age, and one reason for his towering reputation is his recognition of the importance of aesthetics in human life. As a defender of traditional aesthetics, Scruton understood the necessity of recovering beauty in our mass-age of ugliness and boredom. He addressed this issue, furthermore, as a philosopher, exploring the place of beauty in the fine arts and in everyday life. Like Edmund Burke, Scruton was a conservative thinker who understood the important intersection between politics, the imagination, and aesthetics. For those who would like an introduction to this important aspect of Roger Scruton’s thought, his little book Beauty: A Very Short Introduction is a great place to begin. Published in 2011 by Oxford University Press, this classic book convincingly argues that beauty is an essential part of human life and society. Beauty is more than a mere decoration, an ornament from an old and forgotten era. Instead, beauty is something objective, and it is related to the very meaning of human life and the ability of the human being to love. It is an antidote to chaos, to suffering, to boredom. Without beauty, human beings will become “alienated” from the world in which they live and will lose an essential part of what it means to be human. It is through beauty, argues Scruton, that human beings come to love the world and know that they are at home within it. As summer begins, consider reading or rereading this classic text. Your summer — and perhaps your life — will be all the better for it.

~ Darrell Falconburg

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