Kirktober 2026

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.”

“If Kirk—himself a superb literary critic—considered Whelan ‘the best writer of short stories ever to inhabit Michigan,’ it stands to reason that her works merit wider attention.”

“That is the whole of Campo’s argument, and the whole of her temperament, in a single anecdote: the conviction that attention to something perfect is not an evasion of catastrophe but the only serious response to it. It is also why she is worth the time of anyone who reads Wendell Berry, Emily Dickinson, Russell Kirk, or, and especially, Simone Weil.”

“Luke Burgis has written an interesting book exploring the tension between belonging and differentiation.”

“The story that she tells in these pages is one of a brewing and ongoing civil war, a civil war not between left and right in America, but a civil war within the Democratic Party.”

“The Federalist party, of course, is no more. It barely lasted past the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. But, as Russell Kirk demonstrated throughout his work, its conservative vision remains one of the most profound expressions of the meaning of the American Founding itself. Its adherents cannot simply be dismissed as retrograde aristocrats—they were patriots who understood that ‘order is the first need of all.’”