The author of this collection of essays is known as managing editor and regular contributor to the New Criterion, a substantial monthly that has been appearing for twenty-one years and was founded in order to bring a voice of reason and balance inside the agitated and disoriented activities of American intellectual and academic life. The New Criterion sees as one of its central duties the defense of “high-modernist” literature and art against deconstructive “post-modernist” tendencies. Nevertheless, it is also successful in (...) providing readings of older and classical literature, thought, and art. It seems to be often Kimball’s task to provide a kind of integration between this classical modernism and the actual traditional canon, to build between them the kind of bridge that T.S. Eliot and others had long before tried to build. This volume is composed out of texts of this kind, many of them originally review articles. The authors treated by Kimball are primarily philosophers, with a minority of fiction writers ; most of them are English and German, with just a few exceptions. (shrink)