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.
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 The Habsburg Monarchy has long been seen as an outdated empire doomed to fail.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...
A Partial Introduction to Black Conservatism
Black Conservatism: Essays in Intellectual and Political History edited by Peter Eisenstadt. Routledge, 2015. Paperback, 328 pages, $55. Black Conservatism, a collection edited by Peter Eisenstadt, is an introduction to the lives of lesser-known figures who can be...
Books in Little: Notes towards the Restoration of a Nation in Crisis
The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America by F. H. Buckley. Encounter Books, 2016. Hardcover, 359 pages, $28. A professor at George Mason School of Law, F. H. Buckley is one of the must-read contributors to The American Spectator and The American...
Notes from a Smaller, Freer Island
Novelist Derek Turner reflects on the Brexit vote and its causes, coalitions, and likely aftermath.
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
