The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
The Ambitious Intellectual
Susan Sontag: the Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock. University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Paperback, 368 pages, $30. She lauds the way the North Vietnamese “genuinely care” about downed American pilots, providing more meat for...
The Catholic Novel in an Age of Political Correctness
Oregon Confetti, by Lee Oser. Wiseblood Books, 2017 Paper, 309 pages, $13. Reviewed by Trevor C. Merrill If one were to throw assorted works of G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Pynchon into a blender and press the button labeled “purée,” the resulting...
First States, then Nation
The American Revolution, State Sovereignty, and the American Constitutional Settlement, 1765–1800 by Aaron N. Coleman. Lexington Books, 2016. Paper, 259 pages, $46.99.In 1867, exulting in the Union victory in the Civil War, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner asked a...
The Ark of Tradition
Roman Catholicism and Political Form by Carl Schmitt, translated by G. L. Ulmen. Praeger, (1923) 1996. Hardcover, 112 pages, $94. In Carl Schmitt’s masterful but underappreciated essay of 1923, Roman Catholicism and Political Form—written well before his apostasy...
The Education of Franklin Foer
World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer. Penguin Press, 2017. Hardcover, 272 pages, $27.“What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of...
Frederick Turner, Bard and Prophet
Apocalypse: An Epic Poem by Frederick Turner. The Ilium Press, 2016. Hardcover, 352 pages, $25.Whereas The University Bookman often confines itself to reviews of scholarly books, that is to say, of nonfiction, the present review-essay, although it addresses several...
Perhaps Our Shortage of Energy Is a Disguised Blessing
Let it be said for Arab presidents and potentates that they have compelled nearly all of us in this land to think seriously about problems of energy asrelated to our immediate and our remote future. Even were Levantine oil to resume its flow into American tanks...
Man, Enemy of Nature
In our 20th century, humankind is proud of “conquering nature,” by tools that vary from the bulldozerto insecticides. But like other merciless conquests, this victory may end in the destruction of the victor. Nature is not wholly tamed, of course. Not long...
Does Anybody Take the Energy ‘Crisis’ Seriously?
Although America’s sources of energy have not increased since we began to hear about the “energy crisis” a few years ago, our population goes on consuming fuels and other sources of energy as if thermal units, like dollar bills, came off a Washington press. There 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.
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