The Art of Intimacy

The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1974. $15.00 Of those sources ordinarily consulted by literary historians and critics, letters are surely among...

Undoing the Ties that Bind

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray. New York: Crown Forum, 2012, 416 pp., hardcover, $27. In America, it is currently difficult to define what it means to be an American. Not anecdotally, as in “what does it mean to you?” or “what...

What Holds America Together?

The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1974. [Revised edition: ISI 2003, 534 pages]The President of a great American university told me not long ago that most of his students shared the opinion of Mr. Henry...

Kirk in Time

In an article in the February 13, 2012 TIME magazine, “The Conservative Identity Crisis,” the author says that “modern conservatism was born in the early 1950s” when “a young writer named Russell Kirk unearthed a rich philosophical tradition going back to British...

Defending the Humane Tradition

The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, edited by Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter. ISI Books, 2011. Cloth, 336 pages, $30. Reviewed by Tobias J. Lanz Wendell Berry is one of America’s most ardent defenders of the humane tradition—one of the few viable alternatives...