The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join Kirktober and help support the mission of the University Bookman

 

Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.

Would you consider a gift to help us continue this work?

If just 1 in 4 of our readers contributed $10, we’d dramatically increase our capacity to recruit the brightest young writers and tackle more books and topics, all with a Kirkian angle. We’ve set a goal of raising $20k this month in order to continue our mission. Exceeding this amount will allow us to expand our work even more.

If you love the Bookman, and read us with regularity, we’d greatly appreciate your generous support this month.

With gratitude,

Luke Sheahan, Ph.D., editor
The University Bookman

P.S. As a special thank you to all Bookman supporters this month, we’ll send you a link to an audio recording of Ex Tenebris, one of Kirk’s best ghostly short stories. We think you’ll really enjoy it.

Campaign Progress

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

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.

Ames, Hamilton, Marshall: Russell Kirk’s Other Founding Federalists

“The Federalist party, of course, is no more. It barely lasted past the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. But, as Russell Kirk demonstrated throughout his work, its conservative vision remains one of the most profound expressions of the meaning of the American Founding itself. Its adherents cannot simply be dismissed as retrograde aristocrats—they were patriots who understood that ‘order is the first need of all.’”

Going West, Berlin Style

“How did this fifty-year period and 33-year separation shape West Berlin into a city? How did the identity of this city evolve over time from simply being the Allied stronghold in Communist territories into a flourishing city in its own right? And what were the limitations that this identity imposed on the city’s day-to-day existence and its local culture?”

More Religion, Less Spiritualism, Please

“But there is nothing new about the ‘spiritual but not religious’ crowd: they are, in a certain, degraded sense, merely the spiritual and intellectual heirs of the occult revivalists who popped up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…”

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

Ruminations of a Small-Scale Forester

As I hope nearly everybody knows already, our American woodlands continue to diminish alarmingly. It is not only the big forests of the Pacific slopes, harvested by the great lumbering companies, that dwindle, or the swamp forests of the Gulf states and lower South:...

Turn Down Your Thermostat and Throw Away Your Gadgets

Strict rationing of fuel oil and perhaps of gasoline is an immediate prospect. Even were not America’s supplies of petroleum threatened by the war in the Levant, we still would be short of oil for this winter—and short of natural gas, too, and of electrical current....

Meditations at the Dump

I envy my stepmother. For she is chairwoman of the town dump of Baldwin, Michigan. This is by virtue of her recent election to the village board; also she has been appointed to the high dignity of chairwoman of parks and recreation. But I’ll take my recreation at the...

Conserving Nature in This Land

As I wander from state to state, speechifying on everything under the sun, I find that two subjects are most popular with lecture-audiences this year: sex and conservation. The former has always been with us, but the latter topic has taken on urgency, what with the...

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.

Did you hear? This month a generous supporter has offered to MATCH every gift up to $5k for the Kirktober campaign in support of the mission of @ubookman: https://buff.ly/PECA0Az.

@ubookman @NadyaWilliams81 "The past couple of years have been a time of seemingly endless jeremiads about the decline of reading, literacy, and books..in the midst of such chaos, @ubookman simply continues to review ‘books that build culture’—a mission to which I am honored to contribute.”

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