Russell Kirk: American Conservative – Imaginative Conservative 2015 Book of the Year

The Imaginative Conservative is pleased to announce its 2015 Book of the Year: Bradley J. Birzer’s Russell Kirk: American Conservative. This is the first in what will be an annual recognition given by the editors of The Imaginative Conservative to the book published during the calendar year that best enhances our understanding of conservatism.

As Robert Stacey said in his review in our pages, Dr. Birzer’s tome is the “first truly comprehensive biography of the celebrated Sage of Mecosta” and a “humane, as well as intimate, balanced, and complete” treatment of its subject. “Friends will come to know Kirk better having read this book, and honest foes will have to admit Kirk was about as consistent in his principles as a man can be.”

Dr. Birzer, who is the co-founder of The Imaginative Conservative and who holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College, spent more than five years researching and writing this book and was granted unprecedented access to Dr. Kirk’s writings by his widow, Annette. The result is the first complete portrait to date of Russell Kirk the man, Russell Kirk the author (of both fiction and non-fiction), and Russell Kirk the thinker, who exercised perhaps more influence than any twentieth-century conservative in shaping modern-day intellectual conservatism.

As Dr. Stacey concludes: “Bradley J. Birzer’s definitive biography is clearly a victory for old-school conservatism and the imagination. Old friends of Kirk and new ones alike will benefit from this work, and hopefully, even optimistically, will do so for generations to come.”

We at The Imaginative Conservative are pleased to declare Dr. Birzer’s Russell Kirk: American Conservative our 2015 Imaginative Conservative Book of the Year.

Books by Bradley Birzer, and Russell Kirk, may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.