The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Conservative Crack-up, Republican Rout?
Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism by George Hawley. University Press of Kansas, 2016. Hardcover, 376 pages, $35.George Hawley has written a competent, respectable book on conflicts within America’s right wing concerning what is and is not acceptable...
On the Rise of the Enlightenment
A conversation with Anthony GottliebWestern philosophy is now two and a half millennia old. But a great deal of it arose in just two staccato bursts, lasting 150 years each. In a book he published in 2000 called The Dream of Reason, Anthony Gottlieb explained the...
The Immigrants from Hell
German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era by Monique Laney. Yale University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 320 pages, $35.On April 11, 1945, just short of a month before VE-day and the end of the conflict in Europe, a...
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...
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.
