The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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
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...
Lessons from a Failed Party?
John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, & Ardent Nationalist by Andrew R. Black. Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Cloth, 343 pages, $48. Lawyer, professor, statesman, and cabinet official, John Pendleton Kennedy is best remembered...
Backcountry Wisdom from an Investment Banker
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance. Harper, 2016. Hardcover, 264 pages, $28. Whether or not Donald Trump self-destructs on the campaign trail this year, the wave of anger he’s been riding—like the wave enabling the recent...
The Latin Literature that almost Wasn’t
Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature by Denis Feeney. Harvard University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 400 pages, $35.If students of literature and the classics take anything for granted, it is the existence of the texts themselves, be they in the original Latin...
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..."
Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman
