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Reading Russell Kirk

By Hunter Baker on 12.19.08 @ 11:35AM

It's the end of the year, so the book lists are out. I'm thinking about conservative icon Russell Kirk.

If you want a really enjoyable and edifying read, I recommend you begin with The Roots of American Order. That book will give you an understandable and historically grounded sense of what "ordered liberty" means. It will also open the mysteries of Kirk wide to the uninitiated reader. The prose is lively. Highly readable.

Kirk is more widely known for the book that made his reputation, The Conservative Mind, but I think The Roots of American Order is a better read for the vast majority of people.

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Spicy Joker| 12.19.08 @ 12:43PM

Good recommendation. The conservative movement has been led astray by liberal-tarianism.

Paul E. More| 12.20.08 @ 6:08AM

I would also recommend Prospects for Conservatives, originally published as A Program for Conservatives.

And if you like literature, try Kirk’s Enemies of the Permanent Things, in which Kirk even finds time for some literary criticism, of a favorable kind, of Ray Bradbury's books (Bradbury in turn liked Kirk). Kirk also wrote fiction and some of his shorter works are collected in the recently published book Ancestral Shadows.