Memories of Johnson
On Essays and LettersI. The two volumes of Johnsonian Miscellanies were abridged and edited by G. Birkbeck Hill and published by Oxford and Harper & Brothers in 1897. Theserecollections contain comments on Johnson from sources other than Boswell. Volume One is 488...The Older Rhetoric Revisited: Hugh Blair and the Public Virtue of Style
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, by Hugh Blair. Edited with a Critical Introduction by Harold F. Harding. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Two Vols., 496 and 566 pp. One of the most successful of all nineteenth-century textbooks was Hugh...When free trade is not fair exchange
How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead by Dambisa Moyo. London: Allen Lane, 2011, paper, 226 pages In 2009, when Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo published Dead Aid, her devastating analysis of the inefficacy of Western...The Deviant University
The university today is being subjected to the brutal searchlight of inquiry and criticism. Ironically, at a time when education has acquired a new mystique and is the method offered for curing most of the ills of society, this mystique is not associated with...The Dignity Conspiracy and its Strange Hold on Our Souls
Modern and American Dignity: Who We Are as Persons, and What That Means for Our Future by Peter Augustine Lawler (ISI Books, 2010). In response to the essay collection Human Dignity and Bioethics, published by George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, Steven...Education as Part of America’s Secular Religion
By leaps and bounds, the demand for education—that is, certified professional instruction in socially approved institutions—has been mounting. While some recentgrowth is the effect of high birth rates, demand for education has grown independently also. School age...Birzer on Kirk and Strauss
We direct your attention to a recent post on the Imaginative Conservative Blog where Brad Birzer has collected a few forgotten items from the Kirk Center archives and elsewhere on the relationship of Russell Kirk and Leo Strauss. It was more amicable than is generally...Pointless Protest of American Poetry
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr. HarperCollins Publishers (New York, NY), 2011, xviii + 200 pp., $25.99 In this, his first book, David Orr, the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, attempts to persuade the general...From Materialism to Meaning
The Southern Critics: An Anthology edited by Glen Arbery. Wilmington, DE: ISI Press, 2010, 384 pp. paper, $22Glen Arbery has compiled the key writings of the Southern Critics, a loosely affiliated group of writers, poets, and teachers in the early decades of the last...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!