The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.
The Auroras of Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar opens with a twelve-page account of her life as a critic, of a life well-lived with strong inner imperatives. At issue is her claim that she is less what a typical scholar is thought to be.
The Cinema of Failure
Terrence Malick is American cinema’s one Christian artist and he has now reached his most productive years, his Social Security years. His four recent movies, The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012),
Stories of the Lost, Wandering Soul of Modern America
The short stories of Thomas McGuane can be summarized in the words of John Gay’s self-chosen epitaph: “Life is a jest, and all things shew it; / I thought so once, but now I know it.”
Feeding the Little Platoons
Frederick the Great observed that his army marched on its stomach. If we aim to civilize, not conquer, what should we feed Burke’s little platoons? At her first dinner party, Agnes Jekyll entertained John Ruskin, Edward Burne-Jones, and Robert Browning. This is a bit...
The ‘Woke’ History of Democracy
Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought by James T. Kloppenberg. Oxford University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 912 pages, $35. James Kloppenberg has produced an important artifact of contemporary intellectual life. Conservative...
What Exactly Do We Agree On?
“Oh, you snuck in so quietly,” she says, hurrying to help you find your name tag in a pile on a table in the hall of the University Club’s second floor. You are late, and so ascertain which door will let you in at the back and not the front by the speakers before you...
Saving What Is Lost
Five hundred years before Christ walked on earth Euripides was writing dramatic lines for Hecuba, Queen of Troy, in his Trojan Women. Thinking herself betrayed by the gods, she refuses them worship, yet as she grieves the death of her son, she utters a pagan attempt at a prayer:…
The Best Classical Latin Poet You’ve Never Heard Of
Michael Fontaine reviews A. M. Juster’s translation of Maximianus.
Greenspan’s Intermezzo
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby. Penguin Books, 2016, 2017. Paperback, 781 pages, $22. Gilbert NMO Morris Biography is an interplay of perceptible and surprising cross-currents, and the life of Alan Greenspan is no...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
