The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.
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.
imagination
Imagination rules the world.
Books in Little: Seven Prophets
American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice by Albert J. Raboteau. Princeton University Press, 2016. Cloth, 248 pages, $30. One does not have to agree with the teachings of these seven “radicals” to be inspired by...
Beautiful Losers
Heroic Failure and the British by Stephanie Barczewski. Yale University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 280 pages, $40. The unquiet ghost of the British Empire haunts the globe. Because of their empire, English is spoken in cities around the world, from Atlanta to Zanzibar....
Balancing Happy and Real
Beneath Wandering Stars by Ashlee Cowles. Merit Press, 2016. Hardcover, 272 pages, $18. In today’s publishing landscape, Ashlee Cowles’s Beneath Wandering Stars is a rare contemporary Young Adult novel. It is worth our attention and promotion because it should not be...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
