also willingly gone along during his lifetime helping anybody. so i have one of my favorite colleagues, one of my closest friends here who's in the economics department, he is here strictly because kirk paid for him and his family to get out of yugoslavia when they were under the communists and, of course, they had nowhere to live, so they lived with the kirks. yvonne is my colleague now because of that, and there were times where kirk had upwards of 18 cambodians, he had, i think, 12 ethiopians at the same time. he had vietnamese. anybody who needed shelter, they could live with the kirks for as long as they needed. some of these people lived three or four years in the kirk house until they could get on their feet. that's extraordinary to think about. so if you asked me, peter, what's the greatest legacy of kirk, that -- his charity, living this out. that, to me, is just incredible. >> host: bradley birzer is the russell amos kirk chair in american studies at hillsdale college.

who's endowed that chair? >> guest: it was not russell kirk. [laughter] that was endowed by a family who's passed away, unfortunately, the briggs out of colorado and a number of other donors as well. kirk used to teach classics at the university of colorado-boulder during the summers back in the '70s and '80s, and a lot of money in colorado, and these people really liked kirk, so they endowed that. very, very gracious of them. >> host: the book, russell kirk: american conservative. thanks for your time. >> guest: thanks, peter, very much. and next up on booktv, bradley birzer receives this year's paolucci book award sponsored by the intercollegiate studies institute and is awarded annually to a nonfiction book that, according to the sponsors, advances conservative principles. >> ladies and gentlemen, if i can get your attention, please. [inaudible conversations] if i can get your attention. thank you.

i know some of you still have your dessert and coffee and, please, i encourage you to and continue eating. but if you can stop the convivial conversation, we'd like to get the program back on schedule. one of my, one thing i'm most, i guess, humbled by is the wonderful team that we've been able to assemble at isi over the five and a half years that i've been president. and i mentioned nick reid earlier and our senior vice president, jeff nelson, is here, and many of the isi team. could all of the isi team that are here please stand up? [applause] they do a tremendous job day in and day out getting the word out to young conservatives on college campuses and really having a big impact on all of

the young people they're able to interact with. another member of the management team is jed donahue, and jed came to i is si after a -- isi after a very successful publishing career in washington and new york at regnery and at crown publishing, and whenever i run into the many, many authors that ed -- that jed has worked closely with from george will to michael barone, they always come up to me and say are you chris long from isi? i say, yes, and they're like, please, tell jed donahue thank you. he is the greatest editor i ever worked with. i'm -- [applause] [laughter] and i just hear, i just heard the same thing from our most recent author, larry reid, the president of the foundation for economic education, our most recent book out is "real heroes." it's getting a lot of attention on talk radio and other places, and larry's very pleased with

"real heroes." i encourage you to get a copy, get several copies. it's a tremendous book is about 40 examples of real heroes who have showed courage and integrity in their lives. it's the perfect book to share with college students but also with high school students and middle school students. so if you've got children or grandchildren, it's a wonderful book, and so please take a look at "real heroes." i'm also excited that we have jed just made the decision in recent days to publish lee edwards' memoir. so i'm very excited to have lee edwards here -- [applause] and to have jed working to publish lee's week, and i look forward to that coming out in the coming months. and also we've got a number of isi authors in the room. they were here for the philadelphia society, brian, don devigne who's here tonight to,

ian crow, cy bunting, george nash, so let's give a round of applause to all the -- [applause] we have actually, i think we've published about 200 books over the last 63 years, so it's a great way to fill a room, just with isi authors. [laughter] i'm also extremely excited because among all of the things that jed does, in addition to isi books and all of the other publications, he's really -- along with jeff melson and others -- he's really the guiding force behind modern age. and we just went through a process to find the new editor of modern age, and we came down to five just incredibly amazing finalists. any of whom would certainly have been at least as good as the wonderful editors we've had over the last 60 years of modern age, and i'm excited to tell you that we selected peter lawler who many of you know, and peter's

extremely excited. he's also excited to work with the other finalists. and so we actually hope to raise a significant amount of money in the coming months to really kind of relaunch modern age and and be insure that it returns to russell kirk's really ambition of being the kind of preeminent journal of american conservativism. and so we hope to do a lot more marketing and increase the circulation and really even continue to increase the significance and importance of all of the articles and essays that are included in modern age. and jeff's going to be leading the charge on that as well. jed also is the guy that had the vision for really expanding and broadening and making more impactful the henry and ann paolucci book award and having a dinner like this that we're all able to enjoy and to listen to the 2016 award winner.

and so without further ado, i'd like to bring jed donahue up to introduce the 2016 henry and ann paolucci book award recipient. [applause] >> why thank you, chris, and thank you all for being here. as chris said, my name's jed donahue, and i run the publications program at isi. i just want to say quickly, i think i speak for everyone at isi that we're immensely grateful for the leadership that chris has brought to isi over the last five and a half years, and we're extremely excited to welcome charlie copeland as our new president. congrats both to chris and to charlie on their exciting new positions. [applause] we are here tonight to present brad birzer with the henry and be ann paolucci book award. this award honors the year's best book that advances

conservative principles. before i, before i recognize brad, i just want to say a quick thank you as well to our judges. we have a panel of judges who chose brad's book, russell kirk, american conservative, from among five excellent finalists. two of those judges are here with us this evening, and i just want -- claire and matthew. [applause] thank you for the care and effort that you and your fellow judges devote to this task every year. isi is very grate. so what was it about brad's book that stood out to the judges? i suspect, first of all, they recognize quite simply that it's a masterful biography. if you look at any of the many reviews, you'll invarian write encounter descriptions like beautifully written and exhaustively researched. you know, the strengths of this book, i think, suggest that brad shares some important things in common with the award's

namesakes, henry and ann paolucci, whom you can read about in your programs. like the paoluccis, brad is a professor. he teaches history at hillsdale college, and he's a rigorous scholar. but like the paoluccis too, he's a public intellectual in the best sense of the term. brad is the author of several acclaimed books that have found wide readerships. this particular book has been reviewed everything where from the thy times to "the wall street journal" -- new york times to "the wall street journal" to national review. brad founded the imaginative conservative web site. with this biography of russell kirk, he's done us the great service of providing us insight into one of conservativism's most influential thinkers. brad doesn't treat russell kirk as some rell aric of a bygone age. rather, he writes of what he calls the timeless lesson that we can draw from kirk's life and writings. isi takes a similar approach in its work with college students. we ground young people in conservative principles

precisely so they're equipped to apply those principles to what kirk called the great questions of the to hour. of the hour. and i think kirk offers some lessons that are especially timely today, especially relevant today. at the beginning of this book, brad writes that in the early 1950s when kirk emerged on the scene, conservativism was, and i quote: black, blue, beaten, a adrift. sound familiar? the historian bill mcclay may have best captured the message, reviewing brad's book in national review, he wrote the following: given the confused and disspiritted state of american conservativism at the present moment, it is high time for a russell kirk revival. birzer's splendid and exhaustively researched biography just might provide the catalyst needed to set it in motion. so i think it's fair to say that

the judges have made a fine choice, indeed. brad birzer, please come up to chris and accept the 2016 henry and ann paolucci award. [applause] >> this thing's heavy, by the way. very, very nice. [laughter] well, thank you all very much. this is an incredible honor, and when i kept getting the e-mails from isi saying sign up for dinner, i thought, oh, no, no one's coming. [laughter] i was starting to get really worried about that, and i didn't know exactly what was going to happen, so this is really nice. my wife, deirdre birzer, also dr. birzer, and i actually got up at sick this morning and

drove from michigan. so we left at 6:40, and we got here about 4:38. i already had messages waiting from winston elliot wondering where i was. and i can tell you, i actually met my wife 19 years ago this week. i don't know if she remembers that, but it was this week 19 years ago. and she talked to me today in the car for eight and a half hours straight. [laughter] it was -- i had no idea she could do that, even after knowing her for 19 years. and it was really, it was the stamina. it was astounding. [laughter] so i'm not sure i could tell you everything that we talked about -- well, that she talked about, but it was great. anyway, thank you so much. i have actually been involved with isi now since 1989. that was the first time i encountered isi through campus magazine. chris, where are you? i didn't realize chris was the founder of campus magazine. but i remember seeing them stacked up in the hall at notre dame and, of course, i assumed at that point the world was

conservative, and i thought we all thought that way. but i remember how great it was getting campus. it was also that same year, if you remember, this was my senior year of college -- and you will all remember, this is when the wall came down as well. and that was the first year that i read russell kirk's the conservative mind. that first semester my senior year of college. so it really was a very important year for me, and i'm so glad i've been affiliated with isi so long. it just makes this honor even more special and certainly spectacular and very humbling in all kinds of ways. so i would like to thank just a number of people. i'm afraid that if i added everybody here and i explained why i actually -- when i originally wrote this, i had very convoluted thing about how annette babbtized me -- baptized me, and it was getting way, way too long. i would like to thank very much annette kirk for trusting me with her husband's papers and legacy. that's a pretty serious, it's an

honor in ever way. and, of course, this was nothing in those papers i found that didn't make me a better person as i was reading through those, and that was one of the great delights of reading russell kirk and getting to know him in ways beyond just what had been printed by the publishers. so thank you, annette be, very much, with everything i have, thank you for that. i want to thank some other people as well, ingrid greg, gary greg, jerry -- [inaudible] jeff nelson who, by the way, is extremely mischief vows. as i was walking up here, he started trying to intimidate me and tell me i was not going to do a good job. [laughter] it was pretty funny, actually, it was not a side of him i knew. dave whalen, i would like to thank my boss back there, jed. steve hayward has been a huge influence, tom woods, doug and, of course, winston and my other wife, deirdre. so thank you very much.

what i would like to do tonight, and i'm not going to keep you too long. i was given 20 minutes, i'm going to try and keep it right to 20 minutes. but i would like to talk just about really three things that i think were important about russell kirk, and i'd like to place us back in about 1953, 1954. and as jed had quoted from the beginning of the book, it was obviously that in 1953 conservativism was in a very bad way if it existed at all. it really probably only existed as the legacy of a few people, albert j. knock would have been one of the most important figures. we know that not only was william f. buckley trying to clean that mantle, but russell kirk, there were a few other people like isabelle patterson who was a bit hard to deal with from what i understand. others such as, of course, babbin and moore who were gone at this point. but conservativism really didn't have a voice, and if you wanted to look for conservativism, you'd find it strangely in the science fiction work of ray bradbury more than you would

find it in a book being sold by any mainstream publisher at the time. and i remember going back and looking initially at how dr. kirk approached the subject of the conservative mind. and, of course, i think it's essential to understand his form of conservativism and what he was trying to do, and i had the opportunity to talk about this three years ago at philly sock. but when you look at the conservative mind, it's essential to understand that it is, in many ways, a age yoking my. it is meant to look at a series of disparate persons and understand that as persons, they will have different ideas and that we don't look to another human person for perfection be, we look for their ideas. and one of the things that dr. kirk, i think, did so incredibly well in 1953 was simply to make the point let's not divide and subdivide like the progressives do. let's don't narrow this thing. let's take a person for who that person is, the good and the bad. and, of course, we can all tear down the bad.

that's so easy. we can do that very, very quickly. but what kirk did and why he could put a john c. calhoun next to an abraham lincoln is simply because he recognized that they both had abilities, they both had excellences. and by very fact they were excellences, they couldn't be equal. and excellence can never be equal. that's why it's an excellence. and so kirk saw that, and and he saw in those human persons that he brought up, 29 of them in the conservative mind, he saw elements of dignity in each one of them, and he could bring them together and not be a contradiction. so i think it's a beautiful act in many ways of poetry concern probably more than political philosophy by looking at the conservative mind, but he did so much to understand the nuanced nature of the human person. so i want to just give you a quote, and some of you may be familiar with this. kirk wrote this. he was in -- he could get into kind of feisty moods, which is funny, because i'm sure our

image of him is of a very stoic personality in many ways, but especially as a young man, he was full of energy, intelligent, always the most intelligent person in the room, and he knew that, but he also was humble about this, but he had ideas, and he was very strong about them. i love going back and looking at the ideas that he gave to his masters thesis committee at duke university, and he basically ran circles around his advisers. there was no way they could keep up with him, but he had written that book very quickly, 1951. he had actually written it in the spring of 1941 in just the span of about six weeks. beautiful book. everything i can say with certainty, looking through dr. kirk's letters -- and he loved to tube, he hated longhand which is great for a researcher, because i didn't have to decipher his writing, though it wasn't that bad. if you look at his letters, i mean, there are so many it's overwhelming.

but maybe one out of every thousand had a typo. i'm not exaggerating. it's just stunning to look at this. this is how he wrote. and we know bill buckley said this repeatedly. you get something from russell kirk, it's ready. you publish it. there's nothing to really fix. but one of the things dr. kirk wrote at the beginning of his master's thesis, it's beautiful. why am i writing about john randolph, this person that everyone knows about but no one really knows? why would we do this? he says, well, for me, it's an act of piety to call him up from the shades. now, in every way that's beautiful. think about what this is. he's thrown in great mythological understanding with history, and i'm sure the people at duke on his master's thesis were rather confused. excuse me? what, mr. kirk? what are you trying to say here? kirk did that. that's what he did. he made people better than what they actually were. and there's nothing wrong with that. it's a gorgeous thing. it's something we could all

learn over and over again. again, how easy to tear someone down, but what about finding that expert thing within them, the thing that makes them great? so let me give just three points that i think are essential to understand dr. kirk. number one, when we look at his conservativism -- and it was, he struggled with this -- what term do we call it? what's going to be the title of the conservative mind? is this going to go over? and we often forget kirk was a major celebrity between about 1953 and 1964. he was a household name, he was on the newspaper, he was on the radio, he was on tv, people read his books, they carefully followed what he was doing. pretty amazing figure. and yet he had no idea when he was writing this it was, as he said just as he did with his master's thesis, it was an act of piety. who knows what's going to happen? still the right thing. he did it. and he did it over and over again against incredible odds. so what i'd like to point out, first of all, important more all of us -- especially as we look

at the kind of growing populism within the conservative movement today -- one of most important things to remember about russell kirk is that the human person has dignity. that's a simple thing. but not that many people were talking like that in 1953. he sounded a bit like jacques maritan, a very young joseph peeper at that point, sounded like t.s. eliot, he didn't really sound like what we might think of dwight eisenhower. it's not quite the language eisenhower was using. and yet that's the language that ghei birth to the -- gave birth to the movement, no matter how shattered it might have become afterwards. the language is the humanist language of dignity. it is looking at the uniqueness of each individual perp. but i would also give us a second point, something i think we too often forget and especially those of us who tend to be on the more conservative side of the spectrum. we forget that all of

conservativism arose as a scream, as a cry against the mass conformity of the 1950s. we forget that. because we talk about things like mores and norms and tradition, and we honor our fathers, as per cleese said, because they honor their fathers, and all of that's to the good but only when we understand through prudential judgment that what we've inherited is a dignified thing. if something is given to us by our fathers or grandfathers simply as is, kirk said we have the duty to judge it. is it good? is it bad? is it good and can be reformed? this is what every generation has to ask. and yet kirk saw, along with great leftist figures of his day and age and other right-wing figures, that we have to fight against this conformity. we cannot allow america to become one mass, homogenized tapioca. we have to fight against that. and we do that not through a

radical individualism, but as friedrich hayek would say, individualism, or kirk would say, a real personalism, understanding the human person and recognizing that each person does bring something different. but we forget about that, and we allow the left way too often to claim art and originality. that's bogus. they have no art or originality. they've not had art or originality for almost a century. we have been the ones, we have t.s. eliot, ray bradbury, flannery o'connor, we have russell kirk. name someone that significant on the left. we are the artists, we are the thinkers, we are the ones who hate conformity, and we have to remember that. and, again, with the kind of growing populism that we see in the movement and the divisions we have, we can't just rally behind one school against every other school. kirk said we have to think about who we are broadly. we have to be willing to defend one another even when we disagree at times, even when the

religion's not ours or when the ideas is are not exactly ours. there's a necessity in finding that common humanity. because be we don't find it -- if we don't find it, it's lost. it's gone. and so the third thing i would note, and i think this is at least to me really the essence of kirk, and i don't want to be too awe i to biographical about this, but as i think about my own life and my own professional career and the kinds of things that edmund burke would have said were just part of the unbought grace of life and russell would have said, dr. kirk would have said it was just grace, ultimately, and i think he's probably absolutely right about it. as jed said, i've had time in my career, i've been blessed to be able to look at a couple of figures very deeply,. i've looked at j.r.r. toll keen partly because winston elliot said after i got bored with my dissertation, what do you want to do? jeff nelson said, yeah, let's run with it. j.r.r. tock yen, i got him -- toalg yen.

i'm sure there's aspects i don't understand, but i loved reading him. and be then i looked at christopher dawson, and it was mind-boggling. there was a time when i was in the noter dame library that i had to leave, i was starting to hyperventilate. [laughter] it may sound crazy, but it's true. there were so many ideas coming off of that. and then i got the chance to write about this founder, charles carroll, and i will admit i never totally understood him. there was something about him, his personality, his character i just couldn't quite grasp as much as i admired him. but i've been reading russell kirk since 1989, and that said, yeah, look at papers. as dr. kirk said, it felt like it was a soul talking to a soul. i hope that doesn't sound arrogant, it was humbling. you realize when you're writing a biography of somebody, you're holding their legacy, their thoughts in your hand. and be who was my exemplar? none other than russell kirk. how did he deal with people? he treated them with dignity.

did he make mistakes? of course. was he quirky? yes. it's one of the things we love about him. but he dealt with people at a level of dignity. he looked at them and he saw who they were. he was, in many ways, a great stoic. color didn't matter, race didn't matter, religion didn't matter. you look at a person, doesn't matter if they don't look like you. they have the image of the crater in them. let's -- creator in them. let's find out what that is. that's beautiful. and i think that's very important for all of us whether we're libertarians or conservatives. one of the things we like, think about hayek. one of the most important things you can do to make sure you're a great libertarian is make sure you don't judge too much. we don't know what tomorrow will bring. we actually like uncertainty in some kind of weird way, and that's important. that wasn't just adam smith, edmund burke. we see it in the 20th century with hayek and with kirk. as annette said in her prayer, it is order, liberty and justice.

but all of those things have to go together. there is no justice without the right to choose what we believe is good and true and beautiful. there are no virtues without that, and i thinkirk understood that. it's not liberty, it's not order, it's not just justice, but all of these things have to come together. so let me end with one thing. a few years ago i was part of this project, something i'm very proud of -- and, again, thanks to annette -- we were able through the imaginative conservative to republish this great book, kirk's third book, his answer to his critics from the conservative p mind, and we could get into that, but that's a whole other topic. a book he wrote which he originally called mockingly a program for conservatives because there was no program. that's the whole point of being a conservative, there is no program. in fact, we actually like a little bit of chaos and disorder at least at some intellectual level. but he later changed it because the term was lost on a lot of people including his allies, why was he calling this program for

conservatives, he called it prospects. but i want to read to you -- not too long. my wife always tells me i read too long when i read from quotes. by the way, i told you about her talking, right? earlier? okay. [laughter] sorry. dr. kirk said at the very end of his book, prospects for conservatives, he said: the grand question before us is really this, is life worth living. are men and women to live as persons, formed in god's image with the minds and hearts and individuality of spiritual beings, or are they to become creatures less than human, herded by the masters of the total state, debotched by the indulgence of every appetite, deprived of the consolations of religion and tradition and every learning in the sense of continuity drenched in propaganda, aimless amusements and the flood of central triviality which is supplanting private reason.

now, that could have been said by st. john, st. augustin, thomas moore. this was russell kirk in 1954. and i would guess as all of us listen to those words in this room, we thought that could be 2016. this is part of conservativism. conservativism is not preserving everything that's old. it is through prudential judgment discerning what is good, what is true and what is beautiful. what can be reformed and what cannot. and this was what dr. kirk reminded us of. and one of the most interesting things about kirk is that he was not original, and yet he was utterly original. because what he told us were timeless things. what he believed in was timeless, and yet at the end as he tells us one of the principles of proto live rating variety -- proliferating variety, one of his principles of conservativism, we believe that every individual is individual. we believe that every person is unique. and we understand that

excellence. as he put it, this is the principle of proliferating variety. every new person, aristotle would tell us nature makes nothing in vain. aquinas would tell us only grace perfects nature. russell kirk would say, amen. this is who we are. .. [applause] >> thank you.

>> brad, that was just magnificent. you can see from the standing ovation, and all of you can see why brad is such a popular professor and why he is so popular. he's also, in addition to delivering a beautiful and eloquent short talk, he is actually also on time, which is incredible. and which allows us several minutes for questions, and so if you have some questions, i think matt peterson and jacob lane will have microphones, this is being tapped and will be on c-span. so we need you to speck into the microphone to make sure the questions are captured for c-span. who like to ask a question?

don't be shy. we've got a question right over here. >> what would russell kirk say about our current situation? >> thank you for that. my wife told me that would be the first question. annette could probably answer that better. it's interesting to go back some look at his voting record. he admitted who he voted for. he likes norman thomas, which would be shocking. he loved barry goldwater, and he liked other people that we wouldn't necessarily think of. eugene mccarthy, a couple people hey had great admiration for, and of course he loved reagan but his voting was very permanent, from what i could tell, and he enjoyed -- this

is -- kirk. enjoyed good, lively conversation. and at least watching it. it wasn't quite his character. but he certainly enjoyed and it thought it was important and he liked discourse, and regardless of whatever our politics are today heed be pretty shocked. some ways he would think, this is naturally where we would be with the kind of sound bites and yelling and the graphics and the noise on cnn and fox. but i think he would appreciate have something really good conversation and dialogue, and for me, this is something we've been doing at the imaginative conservative as much as possible, trying to live up to what kirk would do. but i think it's important to get back as quickly as possible to actually having serious discussion and having long discussions, not just the sound bite things, and i think dr. kirk would approve of that. he would ask us to go back to first principles and lot of what he said from 1954 resonates with us.

60-some years later, over a half century later, we see these are timeless questions in so many ways. so, i think he would still be calling us back to right reason to principles and role discussion, and there are certain people, certain raidey permits who do that, certain tv personalities who do that and not just because i'm on booktv, but this guess stuff. let's have an hour conversation with an author. let's think about what this is. let's ask questions. things like mcmcneill lehrer, there was a dignity in the way they treated one another and that would be very important for dr. kirk, but you have to ask mrs. kirk or maybe lee about where he would vote. think he would be pretty disappoint with the way politics have gone, not necessarily with the candidates but the way the candidates are behaving. i think he'd be pretty shocked. how is that for a nonpolitical,

political answer? >> brad, thank you. you said that you started reading dr. kirk in 1989, and i was just wondering, as you were going through his papers, apart from the absence of typos in his correspondence, what was the biggest surprise. >> i don't want to embarrass mrs. kirk too much. dr. kirk and mrs. kirk got married in 1964, and they -- when did you immediate? 1960? and even though russell had many very innocent relationships he did have a lot of relationships, and i wasn't expecting that. a lot of very interesting discussions about dates, going to movies, and he used to judge his dates by how they responded to certain movies. and he was really a huge fan and very interesting, and then some dates were walking around a liberal arts campus and try and

see what did his potential girlfriend -- what did she think about the liberal arts? it was a wonderfully nerdy. and very innocent. but, yes, i would tell annette this and say there's this person and this person and annette's responsible was always, well, i won. annette, hope that was okay. i'm sorry. [applause] >> so, jason, but seriously, that was all serious, by the way. his letters are incredible. from the very beginning. there was a moment -- i did gate chance to talk about there is a little bit in the book but there was a moment where you could see he became a man and he always had the intellect. it was there from the very beginning, he was publishing book reviews when he was in high school in the local papers and had been involved in debate and certainly very important to him but a letter he wrote in 1942 when he had just arrived -- been

there a month at dougway in utah after he was drafted, and he was out at the chemical weapons testing facility there and he was an avid hiker and loved going out into the desert on his own and challenging himself, how far could he go what peak could he climb. there was one moment where he got a little lost under the camel's back and talks about this in reflections of the gothic mind. he talked about it was a moment -- you can see in the letter -- his attitude changes. wasn't orthodox christian, up until 1953, and not committed until 1964, but you can see already, even when he was mostly an athiest, stoic,ing agnostic, something happened on the hike and his writing style changes. it's astounding to see the depth. so he was always good but you just see it goes to a much more poetic level after the hike and never goes back. it just grows from there.

he is a master prose writer, especially this book. nothing i think -- this was in my mind, outside of his fiction, his best book. and it's not that they're not all good and worthwhile but it was in prospects and program where his writing became something that was truly original, and yet very much within the context of the american letters, i think, beautifully so. thank you. >> brad, congratulations on winning this distinguished prize. russell kirk wrote a shooter book called "the american cause" which i had the opportunity to talk to russell and annette about once. the felt it was very important book because it set out what it is we as americans should all believe and understand about what makes us exceptional. did you learn some about that in your book and could you comment on that short book of his? >> yeah, thank you, roger, whitney has written the most and best in particular, especially his edition, but that book was

written for the armed services, and they were making deals with the armed services and seeing what it could do to get american principles out, especially after the korean war, and the fact that so many p.o.w. -- they had taken communism when they were in prison and accepted so it much and were cal helpinged, what it takes to be a real american. that was in response to that and dr. kirk answering what does it mean to be a small r republican and to live in america. it's in that book that i think he did say it's exceptional but not necessarily in the way we use that now. he talked about the american mission, and it would be no different than the mission any one of us have individually. essentially whatever it is we're go at we're supposed to use that for the common good, for the public in some way, and he thought that america in the community of nations as a republic that we had a certain duty to uphold certain things,

and i want to be a little careful about this but but try to be factual. a lot of people who don't write dr. kirk's writing and those who do like his writings, think he was against natural rights. he was not at all against natural rights and it's in that book he stresses so clearly what a natural right is and what it isn't. his objection was not to natural rights. it was to the idea that we as humans could know exactly what a natural right was, and what it was not. so he had no problem with the concept. he just was fearful of declarations of these rights or those rights. it's a federalist argue. but that's in men ways a great book simply because kirk is laying out in ways he never does in any other book, his political views and especially what it means to live in a republic. one of the best -- and you can speak to this so much better than i could. one of the best chapters in that is his book on, what is a republic? which was published be national review in its early days and

then issued as a pamphlet to women's organizations. his definition, what a republic is, he is a little bit more economic than i think we would see in the later kirk. much more concerned with the role of free enterprise and economics and always in favor of that. just doesn't emphasize it much. in that book he does but other than that, that's a beautiful book, the meaning of a republic. so, thank you, roger. >> one last question. >> sure. >> thank you so much for this beautiful tribute to dr. kirk and what a tribute to you, you were able to pull this off. i've always said that bradber sir's book on russell cook was the breakout book on this great thinker so thank you to your gift to all of us. my question is you were steeped in the literature, the archives and you alluded ar -- alluded to how it changed you.

could share with is a particularly poignant, personal story, how it changed your life to work in kirk archives. >> thank you for that. a lot of things but really kirk's charity that just hit me so hard, and again, comparing tolkein't was charitable but was harassed. charles pew was charitable. i think that certainly christopher dawson, though he suffered from severe depression and was charitable. think within the limits of his personality. but there was something in kirk -- i think part of it was the fact he always lived life exactly like what he thought it should be lived. that is, one thing we have to admire, whether we agree or not, he did live as he preached. and that's there. it's in his letters. we have talked about this personally but his letters prior to -- i'm going to bring this up

because i don't want to bring annett too personally into this. before they met i can stress as kirk was getting money, money from the conservative mind and then money from his fiction, much better than his politics actually, when the money was coming from from his fiction we have people, hungarian immigrant's who were writing him. i won't negligence names but say i have nothing and i read this and that and read your conservative mind, and kirk would put a lot of modify in an-1/2 and send it off -- a lot of money in an envelope and send it off. i'm sorry, annett. you can speak to this. doesn't look like he was the best money manager in the world. that was incredible. and i partly tell the stories -- or tried to at the end of the book disif i started with his charity it's going to look absurd and everyone will shut this off but it's there. it's all there. and i never once found any letter from kirk asking for money back.

i saw people offering it back. he wouldn't take it. this was a gift. not a loan. it's a gift. and you see that, and i am very blessed. dr. jordan, very blessed to work with a great economist, one of my closest friends at the college, hereafters here because dr. kirk and mrs. kirk got their family out of former yugoslavia. i know the kirk daughters wake up at times for breakfast and wouldn't know who would be eating breakfast with you because who knows how many ethopians or cam bodians showed up. -- cambodians showed up. that's incredible. if nothing else, i hope to we remember kicks word but it was his example how the lived, what he believed. it's incredible. so thank you. [applause]

>> thanks again very much, brad. brad has graciously agreed, even though just had this tremendously long drive, to sit for an hour and sign books and so we have enough copies if you would like to purchase copies of the book and have it signed, i encourage you to do that. so thank you for coming and enjoy the rest of your evening. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction