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.

Britain at the Turning Point

“A major theme that runs through Allport’s study is the shifting equilibrium of power relations between the United States and Britain. The war demonstrated that, as British power and resources dwindled, Britain became dependent on material and financial supplies from the United States.”

Shakespeare Forever

“…in his rich and thorough exploration of not only Shakespeare’s thoughts but also the course of Western thinking, David Womersley demonstrates that ideas do matter, and that Shakespeare is bigger than the harsh but ultimately timid emotions of our age.”

The Innocence of Imagination

“…the innocence that Blake’s poetry sings of is the awe, wonder, and imagination of a child who can conceive of boundless relationships with everything from a flower or butterfly to sister, brother, mother, and father. ‘Growing up,’ Vernon writes in addressing Blake’s poetic philosophy of innocence and imagination, ‘need not mean losing innocence and wonder.’ In fact, a mature innocence that can blend realism with imaginative creativity is key to a good and joyful life.”

The Lost Great Modernist

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth. Jonathan Cape, 2017. Hardcover, 432 pp., $15. T. S. Eliot called his debut poem, In Parenthesis, “a work of genius.” To W. H. Auden, his second epic, The Anathemata, was “the finest long poem...

Liar or Fake, and Other Clarifying Questions

Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays by Roger Scruton. Devon: Notting Hill Editions, 2017. Hardcover, 208 pages, $12.89. In “Faking It,” Roger Scruton distinguishes between a liar and a fake; a most topical notion. The liar intends to deceive. The fake, on the...

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith. Grove Press, 2017. Hardcover, 256 pages, $25.The title of this review is taken from Oscar Wilde’s celebrated essay carrying the same name. Writing in 1891, Wilde tries to...

The Greater Your Heart, the Greater Your Sorrows

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith. Grove Press, 2017. Hardcover, 256 pages, $25.Though they be dry as a desert And rough as a grassland Shabby as an invalid And primitive as stone tools Reader! I beg you to...

Kirk’s ongoing influence

We recently updated our page tracking people's responses to the life and thought of Russell Kirk. In 2015, then-Governor Mike Pence noted that he hasn’t “taken a vacation in the last 25 years without a Russell Kirk book under my arm.” Seems like a good idea. (If you...

Release of 2017 number of Studies in Burke and His Time

Release of 2017 number of Studies in Burke and His Time

The Edmund Burke Society of America announces a new issue of their journal, Studies in Burke and His Time. Volume 26 (2016–2017) features papers from a 2016 conference marking the completion of the Oxford University Press edition of Burke’s Writings and Speeches. The...

Revolt No More: A Return to Midwestern History

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965 by Jon K. Lauck. University of Iowa Press, 2017. Paperback, 246 pages, $27.50.No single person has done more to revitalize the study of the Midwest than Jon...

A Forgotten Hero of the War

Fighter Pilot by L. C. Beck. [Wetzel 1946] Kessinger Publishing, 2010. Paperback, 200 pages, $20.June 6, 1944, D-day for the long awaited Allied invasion of continental Europe. Success meant the beginning of the end of Germany’s Third Reich; failure would give...

The Whole Truth

How to Be a Conservative by Roger Scruton. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Hardcover, ix + 195 pages, $20.50.One of Roger Scruton’s mentors, T. S. Eliot, frequently observed that heresies are usually half-truths. As Eliot says in The Idea of a Christian Society,...

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.

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman