The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.

Would you consider a gift to help us continue this work?

If just 1 in 4 of our readers contributed $10, we’d dramatically increase our capacity to recruit the brightest young writers and tackle more books and topics, all with a Kirkian angle. We’ve set a goal of raising $20k this month in order to continue our mission. Exceeding this amount will allow us to expand our work even more.

If you love the Bookman, and read us with regularity, we’d greatly appreciate your generous support this month.

With gratitude,

Luke Sheahan, Ph.D., editor
The University Bookman

P.S. As a special thank you to all Bookman supporters this month, we’ll send you a link to an audio recording of Ex Tenebris, one of Kirk’s best ghostly short stories. We think you’ll really enjoy it.

Campaign Progress

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured.

Liberalism, Socialism, and Subordination

“First published in Sweden in 1962, The Windmills of Sancho Panza combines sociological analysis of liberalism’s descent into statism with a radical critique of modern trends toward socialism, egalitarianism, and individualism—all of which, in his view, have undermined ties of subordination that once nurtured community, humility, and purposeful living.”

Hemingway Revisited

“Hemingway is blind to the preternatural dimension of reality. Nothing in Hemingway speaks to human expectations or answers our deepest human desires—creatures ill at ease in time and seeking the eternal. In Hemingway there is no wonder or awe toward creation.”

The Declaration Now—and Then

This review by Gerald J. Russello, late editor of The University Bookman, was originally published by Chronicles Magazine in June 2016. It is reposted with permission.

Liberalism, Socialism, and Subordination

Liberalism, Socialism, and Subordination

“First published in Sweden in 1962, The Windmills of Sancho Panza combines sociological analysis of liberalism’s descent into statism with a radical critique of modern trends toward socialism, egalitarianism, and individualism—all of which, in his view, have undermined ties of subordination that once nurtured community, humility, and purposeful living.”

Hemingway Revisited

Hemingway Revisited

“Hemingway is blind to the preternatural dimension of reality. Nothing in Hemingway speaks to human expectations or answers our deepest human desires—creatures ill at ease in time and seeking the eternal. In Hemingway there is no wonder or awe toward creation.”

Divine Light and Darkness

Divine Light and Darkness

“This collection holds out encouragement to those who are in their ‘strictest and darkest’ winters, but it also bestows upon any reader, whatever his state, ‘signs’ of beauty, of that divine light in the darkness, of the one who harrowed hell and rose victorious.”

Every Line Read Is a Gain

Every Line Read Is a Gain

“That is the whole of Campo’s argument, and the whole of her temperament, in a single anecdote: the conviction that attention to something perfect is not an evasion of catastrophe but the only serious response to it. It is also why she is worth the time of anyone who reads Wendell Berry, Emily Dickinson, Russell Kirk, or, and especially, Simone Weil.”

A Secular Confession

A Secular Confession

“The story that she tells in these pages is one of a brewing and ongoing civil war, a civil war not between left and right in America, but a civil war within the Democratic Party.”

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition. Click on the icon in the upper right corner of the video to see more episodes in this series or check out our YouTube page.

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