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.

Harvey Mansfield’s Long Dissent

“Mansfield’s central and most important complaint about Harvard… is that its faculty has failed to design or even to articulate the general education that might characterize the educated man.”

Hebraic Ideas at the Founding

“…is there room for Jews and Christians to draw closer together adding Hebraic ideas into the treasury of American self-understanding?”

What We’re Reading

Summer Reading Suggestions

A Biographical Interview with Russell Kirk

A Biographical Interview with Russell Kirk

We have just posted an extensive biographical interview of Russell Kirk, conducted in 1989 by Sally Wright (whose novels were reviewed recently in the University Bookman). In “Russell Kirk: Reflections on a Vagrant Career,” Wright captured Kirk’s perspectives on his...

Latest Newsletter

Latest Newsletter

The new Permanent Things Newsletter is now available, featuring reports from a gathering of the John Adams Society of Harvard, highlights on recent Kirk Center Fellows, and a conference on the moral imagination in Kirk, Bradbury, Eliot, and others. We are also...

Russell Kirk: Reflections on a Vagrant Career

An extensive biographical interview with mystery novelist Sally Wright, conducted in February 1989. This interview with Russell Kirk took place largely in February 1989 when Dr. Kirk was seventy-two. It was a great privilege for me to hear him express his perceptions...

One Hundred Years of Communism

Sempa discusses the history, atrocities, and appeal of communism on the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution. He recaps books including the Black Book of Communism, the Gulag Archipelago, and The Harvest of Sorrows.

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...

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.

Harvey Mansfield’s Long Dissent
@AdamKissel on "Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary That Fell on Deaf Ears" by Harvey C. Mansfield. @EncounterBooks

Hebraic Ideas at the Founding
Daniel James Sundahl on "Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story," Edited By Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern.
@EncounterBooks

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