Terror and the ‘Market State’

by | Feb 13, 2011

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century by Philip Bobbitt (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2008) x + 672 pp, $35.00 (cloth).Phillip Bobbitt thinks big. In the 552 pages of the text of Terror and Consent, he displays a mastery of terrorism, intelligence,...
The Stature of John Courtney Murray

The Stature of John Courtney Murray

by | Feb 13, 2011

John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation edited by Robert P. Hunt and Kenneth L. Grasso (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 312 pp. In 1955, John Tracy Ellis critically chronicled the absence of a vital and distinctively Catholic intellectual tradition in...
Live Where We Are

Live Where We Are

by | Feb 6, 2011

A conversation with John Byron Kuhner.The University Bookman is delighted to post this interview with John Byron Kuhner, author of a surprisingly engaging book about that often-neglected isle, Staten Island. His book, Staten Island, or, Life in the Boroughs, is a...

Albert Camus

by | Feb 6, 2011

It is not surprising that liberals and humanists, even the vaguely socialistic, have tried to appropriate Albert Camus. He can no longer protest, although in the posthumously published Carnets (dealing with the years from 1942 to 1951) he did make the contemptuous...

dullness

by | Feb 5, 2011

The survival of any culture, or of the material fabric of civilization, requires vigorous imagination and readiness to sacrifice. By dullness and complacency are intellectual and social orders undone.

continuity change

by | Feb 5, 2011

Any healthy society requires an enduring contest between its permanence and its progression. We cannot live without continuity, and we cannot live without prudent change.

Welcome to the New Bookman

by | Jan 31, 2011

Welcome to the new University Bookman! After some significant behind the scenes reworking, the country’s oldest conservative book review is back with a new online presence, continuing our decades-long discussion of the important books and ideas of our age. The new...

Welcome to the new Bookman

by | Jan 31, 2011

We are delighted to announce and welcome you to the new online University Bookman. We will be updating weekly and hope you will follow us by e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Please {encode=webmaster@kirkcenter.org title=”let us know”} if any links are broken or...

The Tolstoy Locomotive on the Berlin Track

by | Jan 31, 2011

Twenty-seven years ago, in 1953, at the height of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, a short essay by an Oxford don produced a swiftly swelling wave of praise among public thinkers and intellectuals, elevating its writer to a situation of...

Five Faces of Death

by | Jan 31, 2011

Love Is Stronger than Death by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press, 1992; originally published in 1979), 121 pages. It might well be expected that a book on death and how we view it would be gloomy and depressing. But Peter Kreeft’s Love Is Stronger than Death, recommended...