These essays give some indication of why Henry Regnery, from his outpost in Chicago, published the books he did. He shared the purposes of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Albert Jay Nock, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis, all of whom one meets in these pages. Like them he thought some things were too good to be lost. All were reasonable men with a few reasonable words to pass along.

That Regnery befriended such a diverse group says much of his generosity of spirit. The value of these essays is that they describe how Regnery came to know them, not merely their work. He credits Picard with inspiring him to become a publisher. Eliot, Lewis, and Pound he portrays as one of history's great creative friendships, with Pound - editor, poet, and promoter - the centrifugal force pulling them together. Appreciations of Weaver and Nock show that there was at least one publisher in the world who looked past their gloomy claim to being on the losing side of history.

Even though he did not always agree with them, these were writers Regnery believed in. Without pandering to public taste, he vowed to publish serious books wherever he found them. In taking the road less commercially traveled, he did not make the profit he would have liked, a regret he often repeated. In the essay about Russell Kirk, a friend jubilantly comforts Regnery: "Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More on the cover of Time, all because you went into publishing." Regnery conceded that it was satisfying to have Whittaker Chambers, while an editor at Time, devote the entire book section to Kirk's "The Conservative Mind," a book often credited with launching a movement. Kirk and Regnery made a fortunate match: both were Midwestern conservatives who placed principle above profit. The history of publishing this seminal book should not be missed by anyone who has benefitted from Kirk's work.

The long midsection of "A Few Reasonable Words" examines historical "revisionism." This is a misleading term because those who had it thrust upon were trying not to revise history but to provide an accurate understanding of it, particularly of America's intervention in World War II and of the dubious policies of FDR. Like much else in the book, this section argues for a saner view of life. It bothers Regnery little that here, as elsewhere, he is going against the grain. So much the better for us.

The story here isn't of one voice crying in the wilderness but of how an independent publisher in Chicago was able to pool the efforts of a diverse group of reasonable men.

Perfect Sowing arrives as a companion to A Few Reasonable Words. Like its predecessor, it consists of previously uncollected essays, reviews, and introductions that offer glimpses into the writing life and publishing life of Henry Regnery (1912-1996). It was Regnery's goal to publish serious books, particularly those that went against the temper of the times.

Contemporary literature students hear nothing about Wyndham Lewis or Roy Campbell, who we meet in these pages through Regnery's relationships with them, along with Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Whittaker Chambers, Romano Guardini, and Karl Jaspers. My sense is that Regnery derived a great deal of pleasure from publishing, whether it meant traveling to Germany to meet a professor, to Spain to secure a translation, or at his desk in Chicago, poring through manuscripts. Whenever I read about his life, I cannot help sharing the excitement of the enterprise.

If there is a thread in all the pieces here, it is Regnery's sense of himself as a kind of intellectual archaeologist, saving what ought to be saved, dismissing what ought to be dismissed. Hence there is continuity between the early chapters, about growing up in Hinsdale, Illinois, in the early 1900s, and the later chapters, about the decline and vulgarization of publishing. All of these essays are tinged with the elegiac tone of a man who felt uncomfortable in the modern world. Much of what he valued he felt was being discarded. Yet this sense of loss, real or imagined, gave impetus to his life's work, and we are all better for it.

Although these essays are meant to highlight Regnery the writer, it is Regnery the publisher my thoughts return to, perhaps because, for him, publishing was a vocation in which he invested much of his life's meaning and purpose. In his quest to publish serious books, he had to fight the financial pressure of catering to public taste. He regretted that he was unable to make more of a profit. But those of us who have read from his catalog would agree that we have profited a great deal from his efforts. I have to agree with the publisher that there is much in Regnery's work that is worth preserving, otherwise I would not have read and reviewed the book. I have read the others - Creative Chicago, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher, and The Cliff Dwellers - and I encourage readers to seek them out as parts of an extraordinary story.

An early 70s investigation of holistic healing. It discusses the concept of healing, famous healers (47 of them, including Edgar Cayce and Harry Edwards). Other sections deal with religious, diet and biochemical healing, and hypnosis as a form of therapy. The place of healing in the occult sciences is covered in a very interesting chapter and there's useful advice on how to avoid fakes and quacks. This is a well-balanced book and recommended reading for prospective healers and all those who are interested in the mind-body connection.