The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

The Urbanity of Russell Kirk

“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”

France and the Problem of Abstraction

“…French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, ‘a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.’ But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy.”

Humane Literature and the Divided Soul

“…White’s debut book… unites a memoir in fragments with a syllabus of literary works on the question of how to harmonize our duties and desires.”

Antisemitism, a Foreign Tradition

“…Nadell substitutes an explanation of what antisemitism is and how to chart it with a tacit theory that antisemitism always exists and always makes life miserable. For those reasons, [it] is a book best left unread.”

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

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...

A Nearly Essential Goethe

The Essential Goethe by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, edited and introduced by Matthew Bell. Princeton University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 1056 pages, $40. What other writer in the history of the world, not just Germany, has covered as much territory in his writing as...

The Last Pratchett

The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett. HarperCollins, 2015. Hardcover, 288 pages, $19.An agnostic friend once divided the science fiction novels of Ursula LeGuin into “Good Ursula” and “Bad Ursula”—by which he meant whether or not her didacticism hijacked her story....

Henry George, Anti-Statist

Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age by Edward T. O’Donnell. Columbia University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 376 pages, $38. Historian Edward O’Donnell’s Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality is a fascinating, if...

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.

Me happily @LawLiberty. Why Robert Nisbet matters as much now as he ever did.

@IVMiles @TheRightsWriter @DanJTPitt @ToryAnarchist @DanHugger @lsheahan @KirkCenter @ubookman @heymiller @Hillsdale @ScotBertram

Hace unos meses tuve el placer de reseñar la nueva edición de "The Social Philosophers" de Robert Nisbet. Lo mejor: se publica en un espacio de referencia para mi @ubookman
Ojalá pronto veamos más obras de este gran sociólogo traducidas en España https://goo.su/5eNFJ

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman