Lubbers on the Liberal Arts
A video of a talk on the importance of a liberal arts education by Arend D. Lubbers, President Emeritus of Grand Valley State University.Listen as Arend D. Lubbers, Grand Valley State University President Emeritus and the longest-serving college president in the...Citizens Without States?
Adapted from Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Globalization: Citizens without States. Lee Trepanier and Khalil Habib, ed. University of Kentucky Press, 2011. Paperback, 376 pages, $35. While our political and cultural elites debate about what to do with the millions of...Is It Too Late for Democracy?
Nell’età della tarda democrazia. Scritti sullo Stato, le istituzioni e la politica (In the Age of Late-Democracy: Essays on State, Institutions and Politics), by Lorenzo Ornaghi. Vita e Pensiero, 2013. Paperback, 385 pages, €28. In a passage of his Politica methodice...Strange Inhabitants of the New World
An excerpt from America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928 By Booth Tarkington Edited by Jeremy Beer. Front Porch Republic Books, 2015. Paperback, 284 pages, $32.Our friend and Front Porch Republic founder Jeremy Beer has just edited and...
Understanding the Cold War
A Brief History of the Cold War by Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding. The Heritage Foundation, 2014. Paperback, 108 pages, $7. For a conflict that supposedly ended a quarter of a century ago, the Cold War certainly made its share of news in 2014. Important...Our Second Bookman e-Book!
We are pleased to announce the release of The University Bookman on Edmund Burke, now available for Kindle. Collecting 21 reviews, essays, and interviews from the Bookman on the life and thought of Edmund Burke, this book is only $2.99, and purchases support our...A Cause Lost—and Forgotten
Lessons from Mary Ward and the Women’s Anti-Suffragist Movement Helen Andrews When the fight in Britain over women’s suffrage came to an end with the passage of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which enfranchised property-holding women over thirty, Mary...In Communion with All the Past
David Jones in the Great War by Thomas Dilworth. Enitharmon Press (London), 2012. Cloth, 228 pp., £15.Nearly four decades after he left the trenches, the Anglo-Welsh poet-painter David Jones (1895–1974) declared that “the forward area of the West Front had a permanent...On Merriment
On Saturday, 26 May 1759, Samuel Johnson wrote an untitled essay in The Idler. It begins: “Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought.” This reminded me of hearing a joke for the second time, one told by someone else, but one you knew by heart. It is true that...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!