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.
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.
In the Ruins, Hope
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher. Sentinel, 2017. Hardcover, 272 pages, $25.Rod Dreher has been calling for Christians to heal themselves, their churches, and their communities, for most of his adult life. One...
Elites and the Future of France
Le crépuscule de la France d’en haut by Christophe Guilluy. Flammarion, 2016. Paper, 253 pages, $45. Reviewed by Eamon Moynihan The year 2017 is the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of the classic work by British financier David Ricardo, On the Principles...
Peter Augustine Lawler, RIP
Peter Lawler was not a Southern Gentleman. But he was a southerner and he was, in every important respect, a gentleman. Kind, courteous, and insistent that public discourse and private interactions both be conducted with decency and civility, he earned many friends in...
Wilmer Mills: The Poet as Maker
An introduction to and appreciation of the work of the modern agrarian poet Wilmer Mills (1968–2011).
Lecture on Kirk’s Fiction
In April the Kirk Center hosted Jeffrey Dennis Pearce, a history teacher and the creator and editor of Ghostly Kirk, a web page dedicated to the ghostly fiction of Russell Kirk. Pearce gave a lecture on “Virtue in Two Ghostly Tales of Russell Kirk,” which was later...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
