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.
Modernists in Middle-Earth
Tolkien among the Moderns, edited by Ralph C. Wood. University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Paperback, 303 pages, $32.I was first assigned to read J. R. R. Tolkien in 1968 when I was in the seventh grade. In that time of rage, rebellion, anxiety, and experimentation,...
Hope for a Conservative Remnant
The Conservative Rebellion by Richard Bishirjian. St. Augustine’s Press, 2015. Hardcover, 171 pages, $25. One of the more common definitions of conservatism as stated by its critics is that it is a philosophy enthralled with preserving the status quo. This definition...
A Modern Plutarch
The Road to Character by David Brooks. Random House, 2015. Hardcover, 320 pages, $28.David Brooks’s résumé confirms his place among America’s intellectual elite. Currently, he writes a column for The New York Times, teaches classes at Yale University, and regularly...
An Encounter with Ayn Rand
TO THE POINT: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 1962Miss Ayn Rand is in the news nowadays. She has written two best-selling novels—Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead—and she has gotten up a curious philosophy which she calls “Objectivism.” Recently she and I, with some other...
RIP Justice Scalia
We marked the passing of Antonin Scalia with a tribute in the University Bookman. Justice Scalia wrote a letter to Annette Kirk in 2003 on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of The Conservative Mind, noting his admiration for Russell Kirk and his writings.
Antonin Scalia on Russell Kirk
The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a letter to Annette Kirk on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of The Conservative Mind in 2003.Also see the 2016 tribute to Antonin Scalia in the University Bookman. In the summer of 2003, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia...
Reading Sowell in the Badlands
Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective by Thomas Sowell. Basic Books, 2015. Hardcover, 244 pages plus notes and index, $30. Last summer, after more than two decades in Northern Virginia, I moved with my family to Germantown in northwest...
Rabelais in the Graveyard
Graveyard Clay (Cré na Cille): A Narrative in Ten Interludes by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, translated by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson. Yale University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 368 pp., $25.Last year around this same time, an edition of this Irish novel appeared in...
A Memorial Wall of Words
Oblivion by Sergei Lebedev, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New Vessel Press, 2016 Paper, 290 pages. $16. “This text is a memorial,” explains the first person narrator in Oblivion, the new and at times stunning novel by the young Russian writer Sergei Lebedev, “a...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
