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.
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...
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016)
An era ended today with the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia, a 1960 magna cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School and a Notes Editor for the Harvard Law Review, taught for a while both at the University of Virginia and at the University of Chicago,...
At Long Last
The Poems of T. S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 2 volumes, 1344 + 688 pages, $45/$40. When T. S. Eliot died in 1965, his writings were left in the care of his young widow, Valerie Eliot. She proved...
The Courage of Lewis and Clark
González reflects on the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to consider their effect on history and their surprisingly effective work in “existential ethnography.”
Conservatism in Disarray
We are pleased to present a review of Brad Birzer’s important book, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, and we will have more to say on the book in the future. Conservatism is in disarray. I write this in the aftermath of the Iowa caucus which followed weeks of...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
