Where Love Lies Corrupt
Tyrants: A History of Power, Injustice, and Terror by Waller R. Newell. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 264 pages, $30. Russell Kirk, writing in Prospects for Conservatives, described what enlightened conservatives know but the tyrant does not: that love...Against the Tyranny of Feelings
The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism edited by Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow. Templeton Press, 2015. Hardcover, 280 pages, $28.Nearly three decades after Allan Bloom pronounced the “Closing of the American Mind,” Mark...An Adaptable Conservative
Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait by Biancamaria Fontana. Princeton UP, 2016. Hardcover, 296 pages, $35.“You want to repeal Obamacare? I thought you believed in, you know, conserving things.” “I just want to make marriage more relevant to twenty-first-century...
Testimony to a Catholic Existentialist
Renée Radell: Web of Circumstance by Eleanor Heartney. Predmore Press, 2016. Hardcover, 220 pages, $80. When I was an undergraduate student I had the privilege of working as an assistant to the founder of this journal, Russell Kirk. One of my tasks was helping him to...Strange Thing: How Camus Wrote ‘The Stranger’
Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic by Alice Kaplan. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hardcover, 288 pages, $26. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote in The Philosophy of Existentialism that Jean-Paul “Sartre’s world is...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."