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In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman introduces us to the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life. Blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman provides fresh portaiture of such American originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other Americans who can't—or shouldn't—be filed away in the usual boxes labeled "liberal" and "conservative." Ranging from Millard Fillmore to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.
What They're Saying...
"Bill Kauffman is an impeccably honest, witty, insightful observer of American politics and culture who is committed to that which is small, local, and nonviolent. Although he has been characterized as a populist, an agrarian libertarian, and a paleo conservative, Kauffman is above all his own man. With many political writers you can figure out who the good guys are and who the bad guys are just by looking at the title of the piece. Not so with Kauffman. You've got to read the entire piece."
— Thomas Naylor, Vermont Commons
"There may have been better books than Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists, published in 2006, but I didn’t read them. In Look Homeward, Kauffman celebrates those uniquely American radicals who make this the country it is, and does it with humor, grace and keen perception…Whatever your ideology, Bill Kauffman’s words will touch your soul and make you long for his America."
— Doug French, LewRockwell.com
"Bill Kauffman is the finest literary stylist writing within the broad twenty-first-century conservative dispensation and among the keenest minds in contemporary American letters. Sometimes an agrarian libertarian, on other occasions a populist or a 'peace and love' paleoconservative, Kauffman defies the standard categories. Above all, he is—like Russell Kirk—a localist, rooted in his beloved (if not always lovely) Batavia, New York, region. Look Homeward, America celebrates the 'insubordinate Americans' who cherish their families, their neighborhoods, and their liberties and who distrust the cant pouring out of Washington, DC. With felicitous ease, the volume moves from side-splitting humor to profound insight to wise prescription. In its grand affirmation of the true American spirit, Look Homeward, America will challenge, dazzle, and delight the reader."
— Allan Carlson, author of The “American Way”: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity
"Bill Kauffman is the Sage of Batavia."
— Gore Vidal, author of Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson
"Kauffman’s marvelous trick of praising to the skies and then noting shortcomings and even vices increases the fascination of his remarks on such defenders of 'family, community, [and] local self-rule' as Wendell Berry, Grant Wood, Carolyn Chute, Millard Fillmore...More marvelous is that Kauffman, who freely injects himself into his prose, treats himself the same way; he vaunts his stance on something and then acknowledges his contradictions on the same matter. If figures he considers overrated don’t get the same treatment, well, that helps keep things snappy. His writing persona couldn’t be more appealing."
— Ray Olson, Booklist
"Kaufmann combines an acerbic wit with an encyclopedic knowledge of ignored American characters to create enchanting allusions and flat-out rants that may remind readers of comedian Dennis Miller. The crucial difference being that unlike Miller, Kaufmann has a point."
— Dr. Jason R. Edwards, The Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College
"This particular cynical idealist (or should that be idealistic cynic?) is the real deal when it comes to actually living the small-town life and celebrating its many virtues. As such, he is also an American treasure—a more than occasionally maddening treasure, but a treasure nonetheless."
— John C. Chalberg, CrisisMagazine.com
"If you are the kind of conservative who despairs over the chain-store, geography-of-nowhere, slob-in-the-grey-velour-sweatsuit consumerist crapulence that is devouring the American cultural landscape like kudzu—well, Bill Kauffman is your man."
— Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy-Cons
"Kauffman wants us to know there is a better way, that is, as the inside jacket of his new book says, 'There is an America left that is worth saving.'"
— Scott DeSmit, The Daily News
"In this celebration of what Kauffman calls America's 'traditionalist
rebels,' passages of considerable eloquence are all the more arresting
precisely because they appear in a work otherwise characterized by such
unrestrained jollity."
— Alan Pell Crawford
"Bill Kauffman is a writer who defies categorization, which is only appropriate because people who defy categorization happens to be his favorite subject: his latest book, Look Homeward, America... illustrates how the tired old labels of 'left' and 'right' no longer seem to apply…"
— Justin Raimondo
"The American pageant includes a huge supporting cast of idealists, eccentrics, crackpots, and cranks. Telling their stories can only enrich the texture of the tale."
— Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer
"[T]his book has a Whitmanesque quality about it: it is a song to liberty, truth, goodness, and beauty, to family and community, to hearth and home, to farm and small town. It's a call to those of similar principles to keep on keeping on, and bring America home again."
— The Catholic Worker
"Bill Kauffman is a chronicler, historian, and social critic. He possesses an equanimity and discernment that provides a unique perspective that deserves our attention. He is a Jeffersonian de-centralist, thought criminal, word tossing anarchist, and champion of America's gutted, Walmartized small towns. 'Mine is a Middle America,' Kauffman writes, 'profoundly un-imperial patriotism based in love of American music, poetry, places, quirks and commonalities, historical crotchets, holy fools and eminent Kansans.' Perhaps, John Prine had it right all along. Go ahead and 'blow up your T.V.,' then read Look Homeward, America."
— Robert C. Cheeks, California Literary Review
"Bill Kauffman's latest book is a sympathetic look at various American politicians, artists, rabble-rousers, poets and saints—assorted men and women who do not quite fit into our usual political categories and often hold ideas that to the mainstream seem odd if not downright perverse… All these people have in common that, in one way or another, they supported localism and regional identity, opposed the burgeoning American empire, and refuse to fit neatly into the silly Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative categories…"
— The Chesterton Review
"[W]e can still educate our individual souls. . . and his book is a fine place for most of us to begin."
— Thomas Storck, The Chesterton Review
Chapters Include:
- G. K. Chesterton: Rallying the Really Human Things
- Flannery O’Connor: The Iconographic Imagination
- Russell Kirk: Christian Humanism and Conservatism
- On Fairy Tales and the Moral Imagination
- The Lost Children
- On the Office of Being a Good Son or Daughter
- The Virgin and the Ivy
- The American College and the Strange Death of Dating
- Biotechnology and the Future of Our Humanity
- Why Should Businessmen Read Great Literature?
- The Narrative of Freedom
- Human Rights and Modern Western Faith
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