Ignoble Savages

Writers created “Western” civilization out of a looming sense that it was in peril. This is as true today as it was a century ago, when Oswald Spengler published the first volume of The Decline of ...

The Mortal Marx

In the mid-1860s, as an anxious and ailing Karl Marx worked on the 30-page essay that would billow into Das Kapital, his daughter Eleanor—“Tussy”—would play under his desk. With her dolls, kittens ...

American Cassandra

A Prophet for Our Times   The modern American prophet cloaks himself in the trope of youthful utopianism lost, and the latest practitioner of this prophetic genre is Francis Fukuyama. His prose ...

The Hope and the Horror

In 1953, a young Jean Franco set sail from Europe for Central America. She arrived in Cuba a few days after Fidel Castro’s ill-fated assault on the Moncada Barracks. Continuing to Guatemala, she ...