The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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Kirktober 2025: James Panero and Adam Simon on the Haunted House
October 28, 2025
On Tuesday, October 28, at 6:00 PM, you are invited to join University Bookman editor Luke Sheahan, Hollywood screenwriter Adam Simon, and New Criterion executive editor James Panero, as they explore the theme of the haunted house in gothic literature and its relationship to conservative thought and imagination.
Register for this free webinar here.
The Return of Douglas MacArthur
In war, there is no substitute for victory.” “The lands touching the Pacific will determine the course of history for the next thousand years.” The United States, except for the 1991 Persian Gulf War, has not been victorious in war since World War II. Meanwhile,...
A Madisonian Lament
A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption by Jay Cost. Encounter Books, 2015. Hardcover, 393 pages, $28.This Madisonian lament might have been written as early as the 1790s and the battle over the constitutionality of the First...
Books in Little: The Effort of Mystery
The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery by Gregory Wolfe. Cascade Books, 2016. Paperback, 224 pages, $25. “Mystery thus lies at the intersection where reason, intuition, and imagination meet and only the both/and language of paradox seems...
The Habsburgs, a Reconsideration
The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter M. Judson. Belknap Press, 2016. Hardcover, 592 pages, $35. The Habsburg Monarchy has long been seen as an outdated empire doomed to fail. To the Central European societies it sheltered before 1914, it may have had a cosy...
The Limits (and Misuse) of Air Power
The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940–1945. By Richard Overy. New York: Viking, 2013. Paperback, 592 pages, $18.In 1938, as war clouds gathered, America's commander in chief, President Franklin Roosevelt met in November with an ad hoc group to...
Spring 2016 Newsletter
The Spring 2016 issue of the Kirk Center’s newsletter, Permanent Things, is now available for download. This issue features reports of participation in a liberal–conservative summit held by the Kirk Center and the Hauenstein Center, recent seminars, and a profile of a...
A Return to the Thought-Murders
Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. Viking, 2000. 233 pages.Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about the last years of philosopher-provocateur Allan Bloom, may be the best post-9/11 novel published in the year 2000. Ravelstein has as many virtues as its subject has...
Last Scholastic Standing
Neo-Scholastic Essays by Edward Feser. St. Augustine’s Press, 2015. Paperback, 392 pages, $26. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel When the Prodigal Son decided to auction off his inheritance, his half of the estate did not disappear. Rather, the number of owners and of...
Did the Burger Court Suffer from the ‘Greenhouse Effect?’
The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right, by Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse. Simon and Schuster, 2016. Hardcover, 468 pp., $30. The two authors of this provocative book are card-carrying members of the legal elite, and their work is a revisionist...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
