“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured.

This review by Gerald J. Russello, late editor of The University Bookman, was originally published by Chronicles Magazine in June 2016. It is reposted with permission.

“This collection holds out encouragement to those who are in their ‘strictest and darkest’ winters, but it also bestows upon any reader, whatever his state, ‘signs’ of beauty, of that divine light in the darkness, of the one who harrowed hell and rose victorious.”

“The proper statement is that [the book] is not merely a novel about politics. The irony that lies at the heart of the novel is that reading it for its political plot can obscure what makes the novel so perennial.”