The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured.

From the Man Who Loved America

“Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy.”

Smithian Wisdom on Demand

“Even readers who disagree with the collection’s broad normative valence will find that it consistently models a way of reading Smith as a unified thinker about persons-in-society—morally formed agents embedded in evolving rules, conventions, and institutions.”

In Praise of Poetry and Form

“Majmudar often takes the long view, and from the long view, free verse is a new arrival in a variegated poetic history that stretches back into prehistory. To embrace it alone is to cut oneself off from that sweeping history and from the resources to be found there. There is still vitality in these neglected traditions. They are not a dead past.”

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.

I have a review at the University Bookman (@KirkCenter) today of @AmitMajmudar's The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (@acre_books). Check it out 👇.

"No one...takes poetic hairpin turns at speed like Majmudar does. His poems are full of sonic swerves and surprises..."

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman