On Essays and LettersOn my desk, I have a copy of the 2003 Penguin edition of Samuel Johnson, Selected Essays. When I turn on my computer to warm up, I have about two minutes of reading, which I do at random from Johnson. It is amazing what you find in Johnson. He was...
Anti-Intellectualism and Authentic Learning in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451In a letter dated January 22, 1951 to Richard Matheson from Ray Bradbury discussing “The Fireman,” the short story that would develop into Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury explains, in part, his...
“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed,” Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451. “As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over.” Regarding the friendship between Ray Bradbury and Russell Kirk—two writers...
Ray Bradbury (1923–2012) early found his métier in two forms, the short story and the thirty-minute radio drama. Three excellent literary mentors advised and worked with him when he was in his twenties—Catherine L. Moore (1911–1987) and Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) for...
An interview with Carl Rollyson.The University Bookman recently sat down with Carl Rollyson, past contributor to our special issue on biography and author of a new biography on the poet Sylvia Plath and of Amy Lowell: A New Biography, forthcoming in September 2013....
Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics, by Leon Surette. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Cloth, xv + 363 pages. $59.95.Some years ago at a conference a speaker mentioned in passing that Eliot had “flirted with fascism.” This comment...
The Intolerance of Tolerance by D. A. Carson. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012. Cloth, 196 pages, $24.D. A. Carson, a well-known Reformed theologian and exegete, has written a clear and well-reasoned analysis of today’s imperialistic tolerance from an...
What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last. Encounter Books, 2013, Hardcover, 240 pages, $24. Demography can be dull; to call it unimaginative would be to give it too much credit. But then there is Jonathan V....
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 Hardcover, 608 pages, $35. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the “end of history” was realized with the...
Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s by John Shelton Reed, LSU Press, 2012, Hardcover, 320 pp., $38. The popular image of the French Quarter in New Orleans often seems to be one of unrestrained debauchery—particularly around Mardi Gras when it is not...
There's still time to sign up to join the @KirkCenter for the McLellan Prizes Gala in DC on November 19 https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/2025-mclellan-prizes
