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.”

From Hungary to the Outback

From Hungary to the Outback

Flight from the Brothers Grimm: A European-Australian Memoir by Valerie Murray. Sydney: Books Unleashed, 2016. Paperback, 184 pages, Aust.$20. “Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future,” wrote Evelyn Waugh in his autobiography, A Little Learning (1964),...

A Life Told by a Critic

William Faulkner: A Life through Novels by André Bleikasten, translated by Miriam Watchorn with the collaboration of Roger Little. Indiana University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 511 pages, $50.In his Foreword to William Faulkner: A Life through Novels, Philip Weinstein...

A Window on a Vanishing World

Comrade Baron: A Journey through the Vanishing World of the Transylvanian Aristocracy by Jaap Scholten. Helena History Press, 2016. Paperback, 404 pages, $24.I started reading this book filled both with excitement and dread. The former because I am Transylvanian, the...

American Chesterton Society Conference

We commend to our friends the upcoming conference of the American Chesterton Society, to be held this year in Colorado Springs from July 27–29. Fr. James V. Schall is among this year's presenters.

How to Implement First Principles

The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Sandefur. Encounter Books, 2016. Hardcover, 267 pages, $26.Timothy Sandefur, Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, Adjunct...

On the Human Art of Cooking

In Anne Husted Burleigh’s book, A Journey up the River, she writes of the human home, its formation and functioning. It circles around three objects, each of which, in every human home, has its own history. These are the bed, the table, and the desk. The crafting of...

Spring Newsletter

Spring Newsletter

The Spring 2017 Permanent Things Newsletter is now available, featuring a fresh design and news about recent events and publications from the Kirk Center and other friends. Among the highlights is a lecture this spring by Sir Roger Scruton at Villanova University,...

The Epistolary Petrarch

Selected Letters: Volumes I & II by Francesco Petrarca, translated and edited by Elaine Fantham. Harvard University Press, 2017. Hardcover, 800 + 816 pages, $30 + $30.Contemporary readers of poetry tend to underestimate the power and influence of the Canzoniere of...

A New Look at Ransom’s ‘Land’

Land!: The Case for an Agrarian Economy by John Crowe Ransom. Edited by Jason Peters, with an Introduction by Jay T. Collier. University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. Cloth, 156 pages, $25. In Land!, his classic statement of agrarian economic thought, John Crowe Ransom...

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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