Educational Reform: Back to the Future
Living on the Future Edge: Windows on Tomorrow: The Impact of Global Exponential Trends on Education in the 21st Century By Ted McCain, Ian Jukes, and Lee Crockett. Corwin, 2010. Paperback, 184 pages, $33. The scope and force of informational and communicative...Dueling Visions
Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate, edited by George W Carey. ISI Books, 1998, Cloth, xxii + 231 pp., $25. “Freedom is a great thing, but one should not run the danger of destroying oneself in the pursuit of it,” the libertarian philosopher John...Propping Up Pretensions
Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber, translated by David Dollenmayer. Northwestern University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 296 pages, $36.“Susan Sontag, as F. R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity.”...A New Look at George Orwell
George Orwell: English Rebel by Robert Colls. Oxford University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 330 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by John P. Rossi This is a curious book. It is not a traditional biography. Nor is it an intellectual biography. Instead it is an attempt, through a...Speaking Up About a Silent Revolution
Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance by Barry Rubin. Broadside Books, 2014. Hardcover, 330 pages, $26.When a friend of mine, who follows politics very carefully, but usually by reading journals and magazines, came across a...Catholic Social Teaching and Contemporary Social Problems
An interview with Edward T. MechmannEd Mechmann graciously agreed to sit down for an interview with the University Bookman. Mr. Mechmann, a Harvard educated lawyer and former prosecutor, is director of public policy for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and...Babbitt and Belloc: Two Peas, Different Pods
By Chris Butynskyi The modern age has brought about a deluge of knowledge and technological advancement joined with a rough materialism. With all this empirical data, however, does man know anything more about his meaning and purpose? Is man a chance occurrence of...Diagnosing the Immodest Republic
The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and Politics: The Modest Republic, edited by Michael P. Federici, Richard M. Gamble, and Mark T. Mitchell. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Hardcover, 236 pages, $95. Reviewed by Gracy Olmstead In times past, the word “modesty” spoke...The Pink Police State and Risk
James Poulos, whom the Bookman interviewed in 2009 about “postmodern conservatism,” recently wrote a series of pieces for The Federalist on what he describes as the “pink police state,” a kind of totalitarian regime that neither contemporary liberalism nor...
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!