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.”

A Fellow of Infinite Jest

A Fellow of Infinite Jest

“…Peter K. Andersson provides a well-researched and thorough explanation of a man who only appeared to historians as a marginal figure, but who was a seemingly important member of Henry VIII and his children’s social milieu.”

Buckley at 100: The Redhunter, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley at 100: The Redhunter, William F. Buckley, Jr.

“[The book] was intended not to confirm all of McCarthy’s accusations or to overlook his failings but instead to attempt to set the record straight about the truths behind many of McCarthy’s allegations and to highlight the danger of ignoring the enemy within.”

Buckley at 100: The Redhunter, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley at 100: Countering the Communist Threat

“…McCarthy raised a specific issue that American conservatives in the halcyon days of the modern movement could rally around–whether the U.S. State Department and its security program were corrupted by what Buckley and Bozell deemed the ‘criminal nonchalance’ of the department in its treatment of security and loyalty risks.”

Reason Reimagined: Ross Douthat’s Case for Belief 

Reason Reimagined: Ross Douthat’s Case for Belief 

“…reality shows signs of intelligent design oriented to the good of human beings. Even more, the mind is uniquely capable of discovering that intelligent design. And miracles and supernatural experiences continue to occur in the modern world, even under the microscope of modern science.”

Unmasking the Ideological Lie

Unmasking the Ideological Lie

“…Mahoney has taken on an ambitious task: a sweeping examination of the nature, history, and consequences of the ideology that permeates almost all of modern existence…”

A Measured Look at an Unsettling Ideology

A Measured Look at an Unsettling Ideology

“Kirsch could have limited himself to serving up red meat to readers weary of the excesses of radical students and professors breathing ‘theory and invective,’ but instead, he challenged himself by seriously wrestling with a real problem identified by the settler colonialists. The creation of settler-colonial countries really did displace huge numbers of natives. What does that do to the legitimacy of these countries?”

Stylist for the Ages

Stylist for the Ages

“To estimate Chateaubriand with any justice, one should try to imagine what might have been the effect had Lord Byron not died prematurely of camp-fever at Missolonghi, but rather, having returned to and reconciled with his native country, adopted the political and religious principles of Burke, sat down in his life’s autumn to write an immortal autobiography, and anticipated the coming of the Oxford Movement with a series of energetic defenses of the twin causes of Tory Monarchism and the Established Church.”

Limits and the Good Life

Limits and the Good Life

“…David McPherson has written an argument for the importance of ‘recognizing proper limits in human life.’ He focuses on the ‘limiting virtues’ of ‘humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty.’”

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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