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

brad, thank you so much for this beautiful tribute to dr. kirk, and what attribute to you that you're able to pull this off. i've always said that bradley birzer's book on russell kirk was the breakout book on this great seminal thinker, so thank you for your gift to all of us. my question is, you were steep in the literature, the archives, and you other early in your remarks to how it changed you. could you please share with us a particular poignant story about this changed your life, to work in the kirk archive? >> there are a lot of things but i think it was really his charity that just hit me so hard. and again that's comparing i think tolkien was actually charitable. i think, he was so harassed at times but many of his colleagues it was hard for them. he was running around. charles carroll was charitable in a very kind of old stuffy, aristocratic way. i think that certainly christopher dawson, suffer from severe depression, he was charitable i think within limits of his personality. there was something in kirk and think part of it was the fact he always lived life exactly what -- acyclic we thought it was. whether we agree or not he did liv