Why the Union Soldiers Fought

The Union War by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard University Press, 2011), 256 pages, $28. Nearly every Southerner was raised studying the Civil War, or, as some here call it, the War Between the States. By the time I entered the public school system in Marietta, Georgia,...

An Augustine for Our Age

I first met Russell Kirk when a professor of mine took me to the Kirk home—Piety Hill—in the winter of 1985. Shortly after that I attended an ISIPiety Hill seminar on renewing the higher learning with Dr. Kirk, Stephen Tonsor, and Gerhart Niemeyer presiding. I was a...

Russello around the web

Here’s a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn’s argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory...

Books in Little

Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto by Matthew M. McGowan (Brill, 264 pp.) At the height of his career and celebrity, the ancient poet Ovid was abruptly banished from Rome by the personal decree of emperor Caesar Augustus on...

Russell Kirk: An Appreciation

Samuel Johnson remarked once that we need to be reminded more often than we need to be instructed. It is a wise observation. The greatness of Russell Kirk’s achievement consisted in his surpassing ability to remind us of those permanent truths of the human condition;...