The Joyful Conservative

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60In her Heritage Foundation Lecture titled “The Conservative Heart: Life with Russell Kirk,” Annette Kirk recounts an episode that occurred partway through her nearly thirty-year marriage. It seems that one of Kirk’s college-age...

The Gifts of the Present

Berkeley-Paris Express: A Lively Memoir of Studying Classical Music and Painting by Webster Young. Santa Fe, N.M.: Editions D’Auteurs, 2012, 347 pages, $14.50; Kindle Edition, $9.95. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien famously wrote that God made men and women...

On the Long March of the Wolves through the Sheep-pen

Intellectuals and Society: Revised and Expanded Edition by Thomas Sowell. New York: Basic Books, 2012, 669 pages, $19.99. In her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor promenades a remarkable gallery of grotesques through the life of her protagonist Hazel Motes, a...

Witness over Sixty Years

Witness by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, 1952) Visitors to Ronald Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo, just north of Santa Barbara, will discover that the late president’s large bookshelf, just inside the front door of the main house, is filled largely with books on Western...

Bottom Rail on Top

Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son by William Alexander Percy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 348 pp. Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy’s eloquent autobiography, has been a minor classic since its initial publication in 1941. It was written...