The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

Everything We Knew Was Wrong

Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX by Andrew Willard Jones. Emmaus Academic, 2017. Hardcover, 510 pages, $40.   Before Church and State, from the historian’s perspective, is undoubtedly a seminal work:...

Public Relations Disaster

The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr by Leanda de Lisle. PublicAffairs, 2017. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30.What most of us know about the reign of Charles I we know by way of myth. From Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers we know of the warmongering...

The Beauty of Order

The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition by James Matthew Wilson. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. Paperback, 352 pages, $30. Despite hitting a few bumps, poet James Matthew Wilson’s The Vision of the Soul delivers a...

What Can We Learn from Ancient Sophistry?

Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras’ Challenge to Socrates by Robert C. Bartlett. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hardcover, 272 pages, $40. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel One should be silent where one cannot speak, philosophy says, yet sophistry somehow...

Upcoming Event for Attorneys and Law Students

Upcoming Event for Attorneys and Law Students

The Society for Law and Culture will gather to discuss “Moral Imagination and the Law” on Saturday, May 19, 2018 at the Kirk Center. We are pleased to announce the following distinguished speakers: the Hon. Caleb Stegall, Justice, Kansas Supreme Court; the Hon....

The Inevitability of Liberal Failure?

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. Yale University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 256 pages, $40. Why Liberalism Failed is a timely and radical book. It is timely because it diagnoses the deep anxiety that now characterizes American life. It is radical—in the literal...

Books in Little: A Certain Freedom

Books in Little: A Certain Freedom

Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson. Yale University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 392 pages, $35.   If you’ve ever wondered—and who hasn’t?—about what would happen if Mortimer Adler and Gertrude Stein met and talked about...

The Words of a Giant of the Law

Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived by Antonin Scalia, edited by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan. Crown Forum, 2017. Cloth, 420 pages, $30. Antonin Scalia is the Winston Churchill of the American judiciary. He was a larger-than-life...

We’re in This Together

We’re in This Together

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Paperback, 608 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by Sarah Ruden For a book with so many episodes of civil uproar in it, and so many accounts of both everyday and exceptional brutality, SPQR is...

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.

Register for our next book gallery on June 22, 2026:
Russell Kirk On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776

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