The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Defending the Christian Faith

“In 100 Tough Questions For Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today… David G. Bonagura, Jr. gives bite-sized answers to dozens of big questions about the faith.”

Unmasking the Ideological Lie

“…Mahoney has taken on an ambitious task: a sweeping examination of the nature, history, and consequences of the ideology that permeates almost all of modern existence…”

A Measured Look at an Unsettling Ideology

“Kirsch could have limited himself to serving up red meat to readers weary of the excesses of radical students and professors breathing ‘theory and invective,’ but instead, he challenged himself by seriously wrestling with a real problem identified by the settler colonialists. The creation of settler-colonial countries really did displace huge numbers of natives. What does that do to the legitimacy of these countries?”

Stylist for the Ages

“To estimate Chateaubriand with any justice, one should try to imagine what might have been the effect had Lord Byron not died prematurely of camp-fever at Missolonghi, but rather, having returned to and reconciled with his native country, adopted the political and religious principles of Burke, sat down in his life’s autumn to write an immortal autobiography, and anticipated the coming of the Oxford Movement with a series of energetic defenses of the twin causes of Tory Monarchism and the Established Church.”

The Lost Great Modernist

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth. Jonathan Cape, 2017. Hardcover, 432 pp., $15. T. S. Eliot called his debut poem, In Parenthesis, “a work of genius.” To W. H. Auden, his second epic, The Anathemata, was “the finest long poem...

Liar or Fake, and Other Clarifying Questions

Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays by Roger Scruton. Devon: Notting Hill Editions, 2017. Hardcover, 208 pages, $12.89. In “Faking It,” Roger Scruton distinguishes between a liar and a fake; a most topical notion. The liar intends to deceive. The fake, on the...

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith. Grove Press, 2017. Hardcover, 256 pages, $25.The title of this review is taken from Oscar Wilde’s celebrated essay carrying the same name. Writing in 1891, Wilde tries to...

The Greater Your Heart, the Greater Your Sorrows

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith. Grove Press, 2017. Hardcover, 256 pages, $25.Though they be dry as a desert And rough as a grassland Shabby as an invalid And primitive as stone tools Reader! I beg you to...

Kirk’s ongoing influence

We recently updated our page tracking people's responses to the life and thought of Russell Kirk. In 2015, then-Governor Mike Pence noted that he hasn’t “taken a vacation in the last 25 years without a Russell Kirk book under my arm.” Seems like a good idea. (If you...

Release of 2017 number of Studies in Burke and His Time

Release of 2017 number of Studies in Burke and His Time

The Edmund Burke Society of America announces a new issue of their journal, Studies in Burke and His Time. Volume 26 (2016–2017) features papers from a 2016 conference marking the completion of the Oxford University Press edition of Burke’s Writings and Speeches. The...

Revolt No More: A Return to Midwestern History

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965 by Jon K. Lauck. University of Iowa Press, 2017. Paperback, 246 pages, $27.50.No single person has done more to revitalize the study of the Midwest than Jon...

A Forgotten Hero of the War

Fighter Pilot by L. C. Beck. [Wetzel 1946] Kessinger Publishing, 2010. Paperback, 200 pages, $20.June 6, 1944, D-day for the long awaited Allied invasion of continental Europe. Success meant the beginning of the end of Germany’s Third Reich; failure would give...

The Whole Truth

How to Be a Conservative by Roger Scruton. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Hardcover, ix + 195 pages, $20.50.One of Roger Scruton’s mentors, T. S. Eliot, frequently observed that heresies are usually half-truths. As Eliot says in The Idea of a Christian Society,...

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

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