Spring 2011
Editor’s Note
Taking Stock
Though you would not know it from the weather outside the Bookman’s headquarters, Spring has come, and with it the end of the first quarter of the new online University Bookman.
The transition has been a success: our overall traffic has increased beyond even the greatest extent of our print subscription, and we have achieved recognition in Bookforum and National Review online, among other places. We continue to attract quality reviewers like William Anthony Hay and Adam Schwartz, and essayists like Pedro Gonzalez and Eugene Schlanger, whose cry against modern poetry has been making waves throughout the poetry world.
In addition, our interviews with Dan Mahoney, Gary Gregg, and John Byron Kuhner highlight the important contributions these authors are making with books that, in different ways, focus on the Permanent Things. And we were glad to welcome Father James V. Schall back to his regular column, continued from the print edition.
There is much more to come as we continue through 2011, including more interviews, symposia, and, as always, treats from the Bookman archives and quality reviews of serious books. We thank you for your support, and look forward to the conversation.
Gerald J. Russello
Posted: April 3, 2011 in Editor’s Notes.
By 'the Permanent Things' [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.
Russell Kirk
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The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religion to analysis of state power and social order in assessing a society’s quality of life, an approach that has since become standard.
Horowitz has a special place in the memory of the Kirk Center. It is he who made possible the Library of Conservative Thought, a collection of more than thirty volumes published by Transaction Press, with which Horowitz was long affiliated, and edited by Russell Kirk. These thirty-odd volumes constitute a basic reading list for the educated conservative, and include classics such as James Burnham’s Congress and the American Tradition, Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, Orestes Brownson’s Selected Political Essays, and Kirk’s own America’s British Culture. These books brought the tradition of conservative reflection to a new generation, and rightly placed them alongside other important works of sociology, intellectual history, and politics.
In his eulogy for Russell Kirk, given at Kirk’s Memorial Mass in 1994, Horowitz stated that Kirk was now “at one with the great tradition he helped articulate and recover”—words that also aptly describe the legacy of Irving Louis Horowitz.
RIP. (17 Apr 2012)
Here’s a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn’s argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World in the October edition of Chronicles. • At the National Catholic Register he discusses a recent Colorado religious liberty case denying families access to funds for private education, based on an outdated reading of a bigoted “Blaine”-style amendment. • In The Wilson Quarterly, he reviews Why Trilling Matters.
(15 Oct 2011)
The Imaginative Conservative blog has posted an excerpt and link to an essay by Pepperdine’s Ted McAllister on Kirk’s Conservative Mind that is worth a look: “What was then more readily an act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.”
(1 Oct 2011)
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