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.”

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...

Our Grandchildren May Be Chilly

Even on the sheltered southern side of our old house, last night, our outside thermometer’s mercury retreated down into its cup—which means that the temperature was more than 30 degrees below zero. With insulation and natural-gas heat, this didn’t bother us. But not...

The Mechanical Jacobin

Mr. Henry Ford II recently remarked that as other countries obtain automobiles on the scale of ownership in the United States, their culture will approximate to ours. This is too true. And other lands lack the space and adaptability of America, so that the popular...

Planting Trees

This spring my man George and I planted more than two thousand saplings upon my infertile ancestral acres. To plant a tree nowadays—particularly an oak or an elm, on badly watered land—is an act of hope and faith. Edmund Burke, writing at the inception of the...

Planting

Only a man who remembers his debt to his ancestors is likely to plant for posterity. —Russell Kirk

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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