A Dark Path to Recovery

The Loss and Recovery of Truth: Selected Writings by Gerhart Niemeyer. Edited by Michael Henry. St. Augustine’s Press, 2013. Hardcover, 648 pages, $60. Gerhart Niemeyer (1907–1997) brought to the study of political science a philosophical sensitivity born of his...
These Marks of Remembrance

These Marks of Remembrance

Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, 1812–1833. Edited by Kenneth Shorey, with a foreword by Russell Kirk. Transaction Books, 1988. Hardcover, 192 pages [e-text]. John Randolph of Roanoke was—even for his warmest admirers—a most...

‘As You Wish’

True (Self-)Love and The Princess BrideThe early Christian theologian Augustine, in The City of God, relates a story of an encounter between Alexander the Great, emperor of the known world, and a common pirate. When Alexander confronts the pirate about his...

Reading Recommendations for 2014

Contributors and friends of the Bookman share books of note from the past year’s reading in many different genres.Matthew Boudway, Commonweal Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life is a kind of sequel to his 2008 book Nothing to Be Frighted Of, which was about the...

Russell Kirk as Historian

Much has been said and written this year about the sixtieth anniversary of publication of Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind. The well deserved attention has, however, generally overlooked a critical facet of the public role of the book and, as important, of Kirk...
Leviathan’s Predictable Servants

Leviathan’s Predictable Servants

The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians by John L. Stewart. Princeton University Press, 1965. Hardcover, 566 pages. The rewriting of the social, political, economic, and legal history of our nation’s most conservative and (from the perspective of “presentist”...

Fall Newsletter

We are pleased to release the Fall 2013 Permanent Things, the latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter, featuring updates on recent events and seminars at the Center—and marking 40 years of ISI seminars at the Center!

Can Rationalism Make it in the Long Run?

Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2012 Hardcover, 250 pages $50. Paperback, 200 pages, $40.Gene Callahan’s Oakeshott on Rome and America brings Oakeshott’s famous critique of Rationalism to bear upon the concrete...

Rescuing Rockwell

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 512 pages, $28. The art critic Deborah Solomon has performed a rescue operation of the first rank in her new biography, American Mirror: The Life and...

A Reader’s Guide to the Most Brutal Century

A Short History of the Twentieth Century by John Lukacs. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 230 pp. $25. This book is a gem—a highly readable and insightful analysis of what the author, John Lukacs, calls the short twentieth century, which he dates...