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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

Digging Up the Bones of Empire

TO THE POINT: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1969 We moderns still are uncovering the tremendous remains of the Roman Empire, which extended from what is now Iraq to what is now Scotland, and from what is now Morocco to what is now West Germany. What modern man cannot...

To Paradise, By Way of Kensal Green

The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman Edited by Maisie Ward, introduction by Bradley J. Birzer. Cluny Media, [1933] 2016. Paperback, 366 pages, $19. You might expect a book called The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from Bede to...

Heroism Was Still Possible

¡No Pasarán!: Writings from the Spanish Civil War edited by Pete Ayrton. Pegasus, 2016. Hardcover, 448 pages, $26. Reviewed by Helen Andrews Let it stand uncontested that the term “cultural appropriation” is political correctness of the cheapest and most manipulative...

Passos and Century’s End

Passos and Century’s End

Century’s Ebb: The Thirteenth Chronicle by John Dos Passos. Gambit, 1975. Hardcover, 474 pages. Publico ergo damnatus. —John Dos Passos, May 23, 1970 Reviewed by Pedro Blas González John Rodrigo Dos Passos (1896-1970) is a writer with an expansive view of man, of...

Fall Newsletter features new Society for Law and Culture

The Fall 2016 Permanent Things features news of the inaugural conference of a new Kirk Center initiative, the Society for Law and Culture; an emerging partnership with the new publishing house, Cluny Media; and news of other recent events and publications.

A Samurai’s Hidden Gospel

A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunkō by William J. Farge, SJ; Foreword by Kevin M. Doak. The Catholic University of America Press, 2016. Hardcover, 336 pages, $35. For decades, the standard American academic treatment of Japanese Christianity has been that...

Taking Things as They Are

Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly with an introduction by Stephen Mirarchi. Cluny Media, 2015. Paper, 198+xiv pages, $18. This new edition of Myles Connolly’s 1928 Catholic novella Mr. Blue invites comment on the state of relations between Roman Catholicism and American...

Sightings of an Endangered Species

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America: Writings, 1986–2014 by Bill Kauffman. Front Porch Republic Books, 2015. Paperback, 442 pages, $51.To say that Bill Kauffman’s collection of essays, Poetry Night at the Ballpark, comes from a...

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.

Register for our next book gallery on June 22, 2026:
Russell Kirk On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776

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