A Social Scientific Apologia for Marriage
Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization By Brad Wilcox. Broadside Books, 2024. Hardcover, 320, $32. Reviewed by Nicholas R. Swanson. The University of Virginia’s Brad Wilcox might be the world’s leading academic...
Genesis Through a Glass Darkly
Reading Genesis By Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. Hardcover, 352 pages, $29.00. Reviewed by Richard Gunderman. In thin places, the distance between heaven and earth is narrowed, making it possible for human beings to feel the presence of the...
Celebrate “Kirktober” by Supporting The University Bookman
SUPPORT THE BOOKMAN Did you know that John O’Sullivan, successor to Bill Buckley at National Review and now a prominent international journalist, got his start in journalism by writing for the University Bookman? As O’Sullivan mentioned in a panel discussion, Russell...
Hope—Is It Warranted at This Point?
Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis By James Davison Hunter. Yale, 2024. Hardcover, 504 pages, $40. Reviewed by Brad Littlejohn. Being of a chronically pessimistic disposition, I used to enjoy picking out Despair.com posters...
The Life of Joseph Epstein
Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life By Joseph Epstein. Free Press, 2024. Hardcover, 304 pages, $29.99. Reviewed by Chuck Chalberg. Never? Maybe saying so really is OK, especially when you know that you had little to...
Order for a Disordered Time
The Roots of American Order By Russell Kirk. ISI Books, 2003. Paperback, 534 pages, $18. Reviewed by Daniel Pitt. If we go back fifty years to 1974, one might say it was annus horribilis for America. The US was in a grip of an energy crisis, the Presidency of Richard...
Kirk’s Constitution: From the Roots to the End of American Order?
The Roots of American Order By Russell Kirk. ISI Books, 2003. Paperback, 534 pages, $18. Reviewed by Bruce P. Frohnen. Let me begin with what may seem an odd claim: the American Constitution is a central concern of Russell Kirk’s vast body of work. This statement is...
Kirk’s American Founding Documents and the Unwritten Constitution
The Roots of American Order By Russell Kirk. ISI Books, 2003. Paperback, 534 pages, $18. Reviewed by Gary L. Gregg II. I doubt any readers of this essay came to it without knowing a good amount about the work and ideas of Russell Amos Kirk. If by chance such a...
The Babbitt School of Conservatism
The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken By Claes G. Ryn. Republic Book Publishers, 2023. Hardcover, 468 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Daniel McCarthy. In the 2020s, “conservatism” sounds passé, and its failure is taken for granted. A new right finds...
For America250, @lsheahan enters the fray:
What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom
A "revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution.
"So yes, Lord Alfred, perhaps you are right after all. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world! Perhaps one last Ulyssean adventure remains beyond the sunset, and perhaps some work of noble note may yet be done."