Mark Bauerlein

Agonies and Ecstasies

“Alexander Riley’s prose is electric. This is a memoir of human experience that ranges from the horrible to the sublime, with never a false note or egotistical display. Riley has an acute feel for childhood and aging. We watch him as a high school kid after school, pausing on a mound in a vacant lot to ‘meditate on the name of God,’ and we see him at middle age on an international flight having a bad landing, a near disaster, the aloof young woman beside him suddenly clutching his arm and thigh in terror, and Riley wondering five minutes later as she disembarks without a word what kind of communication had transpired in those ten seconds of frightful embrace. Deaths are strewn through the narrative, and life, too, in its most mystifying and revelatory occasions. I am glad that I read this book.”

Giving the Devil His Due

Arts & Literature

“How refreshing it is--and how necessary--to read criticism that gets us down to the real stakes of moral existence. Wilson brings us Dostoevsky and O'Connor in their full profundity of faith and recognition of evil. This is just the right approach for college students awash in the trivia of youth culture, reminding them that their own lives can have a richer meaning.”

The Dragons That Are Best

Arts & Literature

“What a joy it is to open this little volume of verse and find a moral vision and acute observation of people and things recorded in rhyme and stanza so fine and crafted. Lind is master of the pentameter line and the tetrameter line, the villanelle and dramatic monologue. Deep poetic knowledge lies behind the simplest couplets. The tragic sense is here—old age, lost love, frustration, disappointment—but no sentimentality or self-indulgence, no false emotion. Some of these poems are going to last, they’ll be in anthologies, though best appreciated in their placement here, where the full impact builds page by page and leaves you sobered and wiser once you reach the final line, which is ‘What have I become?’”