The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Frontier Fiction at Its Best

“This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable…”

Renewing Our Understanding of True Freedom

Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License By Brad Littlejohn. B&H Academic, 2025. Paperback, 192 pages, $22.99. Reviewed by Andrew Fowler. reedom could be Modernity’s most overused yet least understood word. In an...

Abolitionism’s George Washington

The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father By Caleb Franz. Post Hill Press, 2024. Paperback, 336 pages, $18.99. Reviewed by Peter Biles. he past is like a waterfall, and history is like the glass of water...

A Novel Individual: An Interview with William F. Buckley Jr. on his Fiction

Interviewed by William F. Meehan III This interview ran in The University Bookman in 1996 (vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 25-32), when Jeffrey O. Nelson, who was the journal’s editor, expertly turned the lengthy manuscript of my 90-minute interview into a coherent, polished...

Heroism Was Still Possible

¡No Pasarán!: Writings from the Spanish Civil War edited by Pete Ayrton. Pegasus, 2016. Hardcover, 448 pages, $26. Reviewed by Helen Andrews Let it stand uncontested that the term “cultural appropriation” is political correctness of the cheapest and most manipulative...

Passos and Century’s End

Passos and Century’s End

Century’s Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle by John Dos Passos. Gambit, 1975. Hardcover, 474 pages. Publico ergo damnatus. —John Dos Passos, May 23, 1970 Reviewed by Pedro Blas González John Rodrigo Dos Passos (1896-1970) is a writer with an expansive view of man, of...

Fall Newsletter features new Society for Law and Culture

The Fall 2016 Permanent Things features news of the inaugural conference of a new Kirk Center initiative, the Society for Law and Culture; an emerging partnership with the new publishing house, Cluny Media; and news of other recent events and publications.

A Samurai’s Hidden Gospel

A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunkō by William J. Farge, SJ; Foreword by Kevin M. Doak. The Catholic University of America Press, 2016. Hardcover, 336 pages, $35. For decades, the standard American academic treatment of Japanese Christianity has been that...

Taking Things as They Are

Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly with an introduction by Stephen Mirarchi. Cluny Media, 2015. Paper, 198+xiv pages, $18. This new edition of Myles Connolly’s 1928 Catholic novella Mr. Blue invites comment on the state of relations between Roman Catholicism and American...

Sightings of an Endangered Species

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America: Writings, 1986–2014 by Bill Kauffman. Front Porch Republic Books, 2015. Paperback, 442 pages, $51.To say that Bill Kauffman’s collection of essays, Poetry Night at the Ballpark, comes from a...

Books in Little: Those Intolerable Christians

Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World by Larry W. Hurtado. Baylor University Press, 2016. Hardback, 304 pages, $30. In his well-received and influential works, How on Earth did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions about...

Kirk and the Hope for Recovery

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics by Russell Kirk, with an introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd. Cluny Media, 2016. Paper, 399 pages, $20. At the apex of the mid-twentieth-century Youth Movement, the year 1969 marked...

Facts

Deny a fact, and that fact will be your master.

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

Person Means Relation attempts “to find a more adequate way of speaking [about the person] that saves us from defaulting to the language of things...Someone” Walsh teaches "Is utterly different from something.” - @pricerobertg https://buff.ly/2367Eag @ubookman

Renewing Our Understanding of True Freedom--
@afowlXC on @WBLittlejohn's Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License
@BHAcademic @AmerCompass @RealClearRelig

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