Dear John,
For those happily outside the academic world, the word Festschrift is not commonplace. From the German, it translates roughly as “celebration writing,” usually a collection of essays presented to an eminent scholar during his or her lifetime assembled by his or her best students. A book of this kind reflects the academic mind—and in the best cases, the soul—of the teacher.
Charles Kesler, while certainly eminent, is happily not so near retirement as the typical festschrift honoree. And we might even say, along with Plato, that he remains beautiful and young! So it’s with great pleasure that I recommend a new book, “Leisure with Dignity: Essays in Celebration of Charles R. Kesler” as an exploration in appreciating the rare gifts of our friend, colleague, board member, and editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
Edited by Claremont’s Jack Roth Senior Fellow in American Politics Michael Anton and Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding Glenn Ellmers, this volume of ten essays by some of your favorite scholars—Steven F. Hayward, Vincent Phillip Muñoz, RJ Pestritto, and Matthew Spalding, to name just a few—range in topic from The Federalist to Plato, to Shakespeare and progressivism. Each entry dazzles in its own way and provides an incision point into the works of the great thinkers and statesmen that shaped Western culture and founded or transformed America (for good or ill). It deserves a place of honor on your bookshelf.
