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.
A Window on a Vanishing World
Comrade Baron: A Journey through the Vanishing World of the Transylvanian Aristocracy by Jaap Scholten. Helena History Press, 2016. Paperback, 404 pages, $24.I started reading this book filled both with excitement and dread. The former because I am Transylvanian, the...
American Chesterton Society Conference
We commend to our friends the upcoming conference of the American Chesterton Society, to be held this year in Colorado Springs from July 27–29. Fr. James V. Schall is among this year's presenters.
How to Implement First Principles
The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Sandefur. Encounter Books, 2016. Hardcover, 267 pages, $26.Timothy Sandefur, Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, Adjunct...
On the Human Art of Cooking
In Anne Husted Burleigh’s book, A Journey up the River, she writes of the human home, its formation and functioning. It circles around three objects, each of which, in every human home, has its own history. These are the bed, the table, and the desk. The crafting of...
Spring Newsletter
The Spring 2017 Permanent Things Newsletter is now available, featuring a fresh design and news about recent events and publications from the Kirk Center and other friends. Among the highlights is a lecture this spring by Sir Roger Scruton at Villanova University,...
The Epistolary Petrarch
Selected Letters: Volumes I & II by Francesco Petrarca, translated and edited by Elaine Fantham. Harvard University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 800 + 816 pages, $30 + $30.Contemporary readers of poetry tend to underestimate the power and influence of the Canzoniere of...
A New Look at Ransom’s ‘Land’
Land!: The Case for an Agrarian Economy by John Crowe Ransom. Edited by Jason Peters, with an Introduction by Jay T. Collier. University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. Cloth, 156 pages, $25. In Land!, his classic statement of agrarian economic thought, John Crowe Ransom...
Constitutionalism, Both Good and Horrid
Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century by Geoffrey R. Stone. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. Cloth, 669 pages, $35.Geoffrey Stone is very like the proverbial little girl with the curl in the middle...
Novak’s ‘Moral Clarity’ Revisited
Sempa looks back on the arguments and influence of Michael Novak’s influential 1983 essay on nuclear deterrence.
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
