What Is Memory For?

Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War by Joseph T. Stuart

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As if living under an ancient curse, we in the West have lived to see interesting times. On a summer day in 1914, a century of relative peace on the European continent came to an abrupt end with two pistol shots fired in Sarajevo. The events of that day ushered in our modern time of troubles: a prolonged, seemingly nonstop era of shooting wars, cold wars, intergenerational wars, economic wars, culture wars, cultural decay, and a pervasive sense of rootlessness and lostness in matters of the spirit.

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James E. Person, Jr. is the author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (Madison Books), as well as Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow (Cumberland House Publishing), and is a longtime book reviewer. He has written on Kirk and on Evelyn Waugh for Touchstone.

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