The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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A Regionalist Tragedy
Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., Author of Raintree County. by Larry Lockridge. Indiana University Press, 1994, 2014. Paperback, 544 pages, $25. I started with the obituary. It ran on the front page. Of the New York Times. Yes, the...
American Cassandra
American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan by Greg Weiner. University Press of Kansas, 2015. Hardcover, 189 pages, $30.In a brief moment before the terrorist attacks of September 11, there was the glimmering of an argument for government...
Airing Rome’s Dirty Laundry
Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet by Daisy Dunn. Harper, 2016. Hardcover, 336 pages, $26.In the United States we cede too much control of the humanities to professors who wall off their subject matters from the public with the rhetoric of...
The Fragility of Peace
Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World by Adrian Goldsworthy. Yale University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 528 pages, $32.50. Historians, journalists, and amateur commentators over the last century have found in the Roman Empire a ready-made comparison for...
Is a Christian Society Possible?
Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society by R. R. Reno. Regnery, 2016. Hardcover, 256 pages, $28. In late February, 1943, C. S. Lewis delivered a series of three evening lectures at the King’s College, Newcastle, that later became the book titled The...
The Dread Beneath
The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles to Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond by Peter J. Beck. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Paper, 408 pages, $30. No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being...
Watching Shadows
Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature by Hugh Kenner. Dalkey Archive Press, 2016 (Originally McDowell, Oblensky: 1958). Paper, 302 pages, $18.Remember the literature anthology? A brick of onion-thin pages so immense it could ballast a book bag for a day’s worth of...
Solidarity Against the Present Discontent
The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Legutko, with a foreword by John O’Sullivan. Encounter Books, 2016. Hardcover, 182 pages, $24. The Polish philosopher, and sometime politician, Ryszard Legutko, has written a book of...
Epic, Rock, Camp, and Beowulf
Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage by Jason Craig and Dave Malloy. Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, RI. Run: September 8–October 9, 2016. America lacks a national epic that helps to define our national identity. In English we inherited from the British two...
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