CRB: Beyond hope? Beyond change?

With its Fall 2015 number, the Claremont Review of Books celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. It has rolled out a new site. It has sent its characteristically excellent new issue off to the printer. And it has let me dip in to the issue to select a few pieces to bring to the attention of Power Line readers. (Subscription services are accessible via the CRB home page linked above — a bargain at $19.95.)

Editor Charles Kesler remains in charge; he has made the magazine an irreplaceable resource since Volume I, Number 1, 15 years ago. If you enjoy books about politics, history, and culture, or want to continue your education and deepen your thought about them, it will do the job.

I’ve read and written a lot about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, Between the World and Me. Coates, one might say, is the racial philosopher of the Age of Obama. Coates is the voice of the unappeasable racial grievance that has poisoned university campuses across the country. I wrote about the book early on in the City Journal column “An updated racial hustle.”

Now comes CRB senior editor Bill Voegeli to survey what Coates has wrought in the essay “Beyond hope? Beyond change?” Bill is a brilliant essayist and this is a rich, rewarding essay placing Coates’s very bad book in its proper historical, political and philosophical context. Please check it out.

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