Poetically Thinking

by | Apr 22, 2012

The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan by George Steiner. New Directions, 2012. 224 pages, $25. In an often-cited passage of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain explains to the Maître de Philosophie that he wants to write a love note to...

Spring Newsletter

by | Apr 16, 2012

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2012) has just been posted. It features news on the launch of the publishing partnership between the Kirk Center and Brazilian publisher É Realizações and a profile of Wilbur Fellow Ryan Streeter. You...

The Sexual Revolution and the Will to Disbelieve

by | Apr 16, 2012

Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution by Mary Eberstadt. Ignatius Press (San Francisco), 2012. 175 pages, $20.Mary Eberstadt’s slim new essay collection, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, may at first be more...
Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination

Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination

by | Apr 16, 2012

The Princess of All Lands by Russell Kirk. Arkham House Publishers, Sauk City, Wisconsin 53583. 1979. 238 pages. $8.95. [The stories from this volume are included in Ancestral Shadows (Eerdmans 2004), Kirk’s collected ghostly tales. —Ed.] On the surface, these are...

RIP Irving Louis Horowitz

by | Apr 16, 2012

The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religionto analysis of state power and social order in...

Grounding the Life of the Mind

by | Apr 9, 2012

Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books (Wilmington, DE), 2011. 187 pp., $28 clothThe Great Books approach to education, promoted by one of the subjects of this book, Mortimer Adler, is noble in...

A Thundering Paradox of a Life

by | Apr 2, 2012

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis. New York: The Penguin Press. 2011. 784 pp. $40. William Manchester in his acclaimed biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar, introduced his subject as a “thundering paradox of a man.” The same could be...

Man, Proud Man

by | Mar 25, 2012

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo, translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso Books, 2011. Pages viii+375. $35. Paradox and irony immediately confront the historian of liberalism. Commonly understood as the tradition of political thought...

On Being a Basel Professor

by | Mar 25, 2012

On Essays and LettersIn Walter Kaufmann’s chronology of Nietzsche’s life, under 1889, it states briefly, that “Nietzsche becomes insane early in January in Turin.” Insanity, evidently, is no impediment to writing letters. Chesterton said that the maniac was the man...