Russell Kirk: American Conservative
by bradley j. birzer
kentucky, 608 pages, $34.95
Drive up Route 131 from Grand Rapids, veer east of the Manistee National Forest, and you come to the village of Mecosta. This is a tiny hamlet of nineteenth-century settlement, much reduced from its ancient prosperity, yet the house is there, newly built from the ashes of its fiery ruin, Piety Hill, an Italianate pile, which began as a lumber baron’s residence, sank to a refuge for impoverished gentry, and became the seat of a literary man—a history suggestive of larger changes in American society since 1918. For in that year, Russell Amos Kirk, the heir and future occupant of the house, was born. And you may reflect with Kirk that the vanity of human wishes is writ large at Mecosta.
