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.
Diana Trilling’s Search for a Hero
The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling by Natalie Robins. Columbia University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 424 pages, $33.“In the actual conduct of our lives Lionel and I silently accepted the premise that my first responsibility was to my home and family.” So...
Schiller and the Two Drives of the Person
González looks at lessons for today’s postmodern culture in the German Romantic’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man.
Virtue: Can It Be Taught?
by Russell Kirk Are there men and women in America today of virtue sufficient to withstand and repel the forces of disorder? Or have we, as a people, grown too fond of creature-comforts and a fancied security to venture our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in...
The Illusion of Human Rights
“There exists something even more important than civil liberties: the survival of legitimate governments.”Human rights, some folk tell us, are not fully realized in El Salvador. Other people have discovered, somewhat tardily, that human rights are not altogether...
Prospects for American Education
An address discussing the findings of the Report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education. “There will come about a marked decline of prosperity and of national strength—with no one knowing why, or at least no one daring to explain why.”For more than...
The Surly Sullen Bell
By Russell A. Kirk And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? Isaiah VIII:19 Having stared at the river for half an...
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 Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
