It All Began in Old Mill Basin, Brooklyn: A Tribute to Gerald J. Russello on the Second Anniversary of His Death
By Gerard T. Mundy. On November 7, 2021, Gerald J. Russello, editor of The University Bookman for sixteen years and a man whose jolly heart seemed so often to be in the right place, died too young. Exuding a contagious type of positivity regardless of the situation,...
Kennan: The Fallible Prophet We Need
George Kennan for Our Time By Lee Congdon. Northern Illinois University Press, 2022. Paperback, 232 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Francis P. Sempa. The United States in the early 21st century, Lee Congdon writes, suffers from a wayward internationalist foreign policy...
Cities, as Social Science Sees Them
The Future of Cities Edited by Joel Kotkin and Ryan Streeter. American Enterprise Institute, 2022. Reviewed by Mark G. Brennan. Those who care about the future of cities need to pay attention to Chapman University Urban Futures Fellow Joel Kotkin. The New York Times...
Upcoming Event: The Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture
On November 15, The University Bookman and friends will hold a memorial lecture in honor of Gerald Russello, longtime editor of The University Bookman. Dr. Dermot Quinn, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Seton Hall University, will speak on Gerald Russello...
The Lost Art of Memento Mori
Meditations on Death: Preparing for Eternity By Thomas à Kempis. Translated by Fr. Robert Nixon, OSB. TAN Books, 2023. Hardcover, 88 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Thomas Banks. To scratch an itch of curiosity, I recently entered the word “Death” into the Amazon search...
Fundamentally Religious and Catholic
Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway. Word on Fire Academic, 2023. Hardcover, 532 pages, $ 34.95. Reviewed by Adam Schwartz. J. R. R. Tolkien famously described The Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”...
A Contemporary Literary Work of the Moral Imagination
The Professor’s Dog and Other Stories By David B. Schock. PenUltimate, Ltd., 2022. Paperback, 155 pages, $11.95. Reviewed by Jonathan R. Eller. David B. Schock’s wide-ranging career as a newspaper editor, filmmaker, and non-fiction author draws inspiration from a...
Must the University Be Political?
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s By Ellen Schrecker. University of Chicago Press, 2021. Hardcover, 616 pages, $35. Reviewed by Ethan Schrum. Should academic departments and scholarly societies issue position statements on current political matters?...
What Do Fungi Have to Do with Athens?
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures By Merlin Sheldrake. Random House, 2020. Hardcover, 368 pages, $28. Reviewed by Eve Tushnet. There are fungi that hunt their prey. Fungi can communicate, trade, and defend. They...
Ah, just your typical 663-page light summer beach read for a @ubookman book review. Makes Wealth of Nations look like a Substack essay.