Whos endowed that chair . Guest it was not russell kirk. [laughter] that was endowed by a family whos 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 coloradoboulder 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 years 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, wed like to get the program back on schedule. One of my, one thing im most, i guess, humbled by is the Wonderful Team that weve been able to assemble at isi over the five and a half years that ive 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 theyre 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 theyre like, please, tell jed donahue thank you. He is the greatest editor i ever worked with. Im [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. Its getting a lot of attention on talk radio and other places, and larrys very pleased with real heroes. I encourage you to get a copy, get several copies. Its a tremendous book is about 40 examples of real heroes who have showed courage and integrity in their lives. Its the perfect book to share with College Students but also with High School Students and middle school students. So if youve got children or grandchildren, its a wonderful book, and so please take a look at real heroes. Im also excited that we have jed just made the decision in recent days to publish lee edwards memoir. So im very excited to have lee edwards here [applause] and to have jed working to publish lees week, and i look forward to that coming out in the coming months. And also weve got a number of isi authors in the room. They were here for the philadelphia society, brian, don devigne whos here tonight to, ian crow, cy bunting, george nash, so lets give a round of applause to all the [applause] we have actually, i think weve published about 200 books over the last 63 years, so its a great way to fill a room, just with isi authors. [laughter] im also extremely excited because among all of the things that jed does, in addition to isi books and all of the other publications, hes really along with jeff melson and others hes 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 weve had over the last 60 years of modern age, and im excited to tell you that we selected peter lawler who many of you know, and peters extremely excited. Hes 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 Kirks 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 jeffs 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 were all able to enjoy and to listen to the 2016 award winner. And so without further ado, id 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 names 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 were immensely grateful for the leadership that chris has brought to isi over the last five and a half years, and were 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 years 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 brads 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 brads book that stood out to the judges . I suspect, first of all, they recognize quite simply that its a masterful biography. If you look at any of the many reviews, youll 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 awards 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 hes a rigorous scholar. But like the paoluccis too, hes 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, hes done us the Great Service of providing us insight into one of conservativisms most influential thinkers. Brad doesnt 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 kirks life and writings. Isi takes a similar approach in its work with College Students. We ground young people in conservative principles precisely so theyre 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 brads 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. Birzers splendid and exhaustively researched biography just might provide the catalyst needed to set it in motion. So i think its 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 things 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 emails from isi saying sign up for dinner, i thought, oh, no, no ones coming. [laughter] i was starting to get really worried about that, and i didnt 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 dont 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 im 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 didnt 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 Kirks the conservative mind. That first semester my senior year of college. So it really was a very important year for me, and im so glad ive 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. Im 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 husbands papers and legacy. Thats a pretty serious, its an honor in ever way. And, of course, this was nothing in those papers i found that didnt 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 im not going to keep you too long. I was given 20 minutes, im 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 id 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 didnt have a voice, and if you wanted to look for conservativism, youd 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 its 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, its 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 dont 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 lets not divide and subdivide like the progressives do. Lets dont narrow this thing. Lets take a person for who that person is, the good and the bad. And, of course, we can all tear down the bad. Thats 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 couldnt be equal. And excellence can never be equal. Thats why its 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 its 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 im 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. Kirks letters and he loved to tube, he hated longhand which is great for a researcher, because i didnt have to decipher his writing, though it wasnt that bad. If you look at his letters, i mean, there are so many its overwhelming. But maybe one out of every thousand had a typo. Im not exaggerating. Its 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, its ready. You publish it. Theres nothing to really fix. But one of the things dr. Kirk wrote at the beginning of his masters thesis, its 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, its an act of piety to call him up from the shades. Now, in every way thats beautiful. Think about what this is. Hes thrown in great mythological understanding with history, and im sure the people at duke on his masters thesis were rather confused. Excuse me . What, mr. Kirk . What are you trying to say here . Kirk did that. Thats what he did. He made People Better than what they actually were. And theres nothing wrong with that. Its a gorgeous thing. Its 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 . Whats 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 masters thesis, it was an act of piety. Who knows whats going to happen . Still the right thing. He did it. And he did it over and over again against incredible odds. So what id 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. Thats 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 didnt really sound like what we might think of dwight eisenhower. Its not quite the language eisenhower was using. And yet thats 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. Bu