The appearance of a new book by Willmoore Kendall, moreover the whole of it by Willmoore Kendall (he is given to working with co-authors—and, incidentally, to constructing sentences like the one I am just now struggling to terminate) is, off at the end, make no mistake about it, the event of the season; as he might himself have put it. He calls it The Conservative Affirmation, no less, a singular piece of impudence, of the kind that makes him endearing to his friends, and so outrageously offensive to his enemies (Kendall has a capacity for infuriating Liberals that makes this reviewer positively green with envy). As a matter of fact the book is not affirmative in the way in which the title suggests. Indeed the working title, What Is Conservatism, and Other Anti-Liberal Essays, was more suggestive of the contents of the book and even of the style of the author, which is supremely elegant, yet relentlessly barefisted; it is tortuous, yet you can plot a straight line from his first point all the way to his last, miles and miles away; it is apparently wordy and redundant, yet rigorously idiomatic and disciplined; involuted, yet infinitely bending: a style, notwithstanding the annoying personal mannerisms, becoming to one of the most superb and original political analysts in Christendom. We have all to be grateful that in recent years Kendall turned his withering analytical powers against enemies who are, for the most part, also the enemies of more orthodox American conservatives.
The Conservative Affirmation, by Willmoore Kendall. Henry Regnery, $4.95
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