The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

The Urbanity of Russell Kirk

“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”

From the Man Who Loved America

“Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy.”

Smithian Wisdom on Demand

“Even readers who disagree with the collection’s broad normative valence will find that it consistently models a way of reading Smith as a unified thinker about persons-in-society—morally formed agents embedded in evolving rules, conventions, and institutions.”

In Praise of Poetry and Form

“Majmudar often takes the long view, and from the long view, free verse is a new arrival in a variegated poetic history that stretches back into prehistory. To embrace it alone is to cut oneself off from that sweeping history and from the resources to be found there. There is still vitality in these neglected traditions. They are not a dead past.”

What Exactly Do We Agree On?

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

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:…

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...

Conservative Fictions, Fictional Conservatism?

A conversation with Adam Bellow. A full transcript is below, and the unedited audio of this interview may be played or downloaded here (MP3, 27 MB, 27 minutes). Interviewed by MARK JUDGE Mark Judge: I am speaking with Adam Bellow, who is a well-known editor. He’s done...

The Meiji Restoration at 150

A critical gaze falls on Meiji sloganeering. JASON MORGAN In 1853, American ships under the command of U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry appeared in Uraga Bay off the coast of Japan. Their purpose was to deliver to the Japanese authorities a list of demands, couched...

The Duty to Rewrite History

Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian by Richard Aldous. W.W. Norton, 2017. Hardcover, 486 pages, $30. John C. Chalberg Early on in his magisterial biography of an “imperial historian,” biographer Richard Aldous asks a question that he never really answers: Was Arthur...

Hoffer and the True Believers

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. Perennial Classics, 1960, 2010. Paperback, 192 pages, $15. PEDRO BLAS GONZÁLEZ The American philosopher Eric Hoffer (1902–1983) is a rare thinker. Hoffer is a philosopher in the classic sense...

What Did the Declaration Declare?

The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government by Steve Pincus. Yale University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 207 pages, $26. GLENN A. MOOTS Steve Pincus’s The Heart of the Declaration promises a “new perspective” on the Founders and the intent...

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.

I have a review at the University Bookman (@KirkCenter) today of @AmitMajmudar's The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (@acre_books). Check it out 👇.

"No one...takes poetic hairpin turns at speed like Majmudar does. His poems are full of sonic swerves and surprises..."

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