The essays in this volume were written by Irving Kristol's friends and
intellectual compatriots for his seventy-fifth birthday,
January 22, 1995. The book also includes a collection of passages from Kristol's writings and a bibliography of his
published work through the end of 1994. Christopher DeMuth is the president of AEI; William Kristol is the chairman of the Project for the Republican Future. A summary of the book follows.
Since his first published essay more than fifty years ago, Irving Kristol has written with rare insight and prescience on topics ranging from politics to literature and from economics to religion, while editing several of the most influential
intellectual journals of our time and serving as mentor and career shaper to hundreds of journalists, intellectuals, and academics. What is most striking about Kristol, however, is not that he is an effective generalist in an age of specialists but that his wide-ranging work exhibits strong intellectual unity; he not only crosses but combines disparate fields of inquiry and does so in a way that deepens our understanding of each field.