The Bookman at Its Best

Dear Friends, This has been a wonderful year for the Bookman and our circle of friends, writers, and supporters. The Bookman published over a hundred reviews, essays, interviews, and symposia in 2014. Among them we would note the symposia we held on James Poulos’s...

Congratulations, Caleb!

Congratulations to Bookman contributor Caleb Stegall, who was selected for a seat on the Kansas Supreme Court. We wish him all the best.

In Search of Community

Community and Tradition: Conservative Perspectives on the American Experience, edited by George W. Carey and Bruce Frohnen. Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Paper, 216pp., $23.This is a valuable and timely book, and a welcome reminder that the conservative mind is...

The Marxist Jeremiah

Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 234 pages, $26.There are few polemicists writing in the English language today as erudite, or as pugnacious, as Terry Eagleton. Nor are there many public intellectuals who so defy...

Fiction and Philosophy

On Moral Fiction, by John Gardner. Basic Books, 1977. When you make up a story about America and say that we are the worst killers of all, that we are worse than Russia or China, then . . . well, I think you’ve made up an evil story.” That evaluation of the integrity...

Science Fiction Worth Re-Reading?

What Makes This Book so Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Jo Walton. Tor, 2014. Hardcover, 447 pages, $27.Insofar as “genre” means commercial formula-fiction, it is safe to say that between the late nineteenth century, when the formulas...

An Echo from the Cold War

The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven For Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2014. Hardcover, 231 pages (plus acknowledgments, notes, and index), $28. Write a nonfiction history to read like a novel—offering suspense, interesting...

Kirk in the Clarion Review

Russell Kirk’s autobiographical essay, “Is Life Worth Living” is featured in The Clarion Review this month.

The Prospect of an Authentic Conservatism

Prospects for Conservatives: A Compass for Rediscovering the Permanent Things by Russell Kirk, with a new introduction by Bradley J. Birzer. Imaginative Conservative Books, 2013. Hardcover, 278 pages, $25.Russell Kirk’s most spirited work, Prospects for Conservatives...

Civilization in Davy Jones’s Locker

The Emerging Atlantic Culture by Thomas Molnar. Transaction Publishers, 1994. 110pp., $34.95 cloth. Thomas Molnar has never hesitated to say how horrible he finds America, and the razor edge of his dislike is as sharp here as in a dozen earlier books. It is more of a...