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.”

Books in Little: Those Intolerable Christians

Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World by Larry W. Hurtado. Baylor University Press, 2016. Hardback, 304 pages, $30. In his well-received and influential works, How on Earth did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions about...

Kirk and the Hope for Recovery

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics by Russell Kirk, with an introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd. Cluny Media, 2016. Paper, 399 pages, $20. At the apex of the mid-twentieth-century Youth Movement, the year 1969 marked...

Facts

Deny a fact, and that fact will be your master.

Books in Little: Seven Prophets

American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice by Albert J. Raboteau. Princeton University Press, 2016. Cloth, 248 pages, $30. One does not have to agree with the teachings of these seven “radicals” to be inspired by...

Beautiful Losers

Heroic Failure and the British by Stephanie Barczewski. Yale University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 280 pages, $40. The unquiet ghost of the British Empire haunts the globe. Because of their empire, English is spoken in cities around the world, from Atlanta to Zanzibar....

Balancing Happy and Real

Beneath Wandering Stars by Ashlee Cowles. Merit Press, 2016. Hardcover, 272 pages, $18. In today’s publishing landscape, Ashlee Cowles’s Beneath Wandering Stars is a rare contemporary Young Adult novel. It is worth our attention and promotion because it should not be...

2017 Burke Conference Announced

The Edmund Burke Society announces its next conference, to be held on 10-11 February 2017 at St John Fisher College in Rochester, New York. The theme for this gathering is “Edmund Burke and The Conservative Mind: Russell Kirk on the Burke Revival Then and Now.” The...

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...

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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