The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.
The Many Dimensions of Charles Williams
Charles Williams: The Third Inkling by Grevel Lindop. Oxford University Press, 2015. Cloth, xx + 493 pp., $35.Acclaimed in his day by the likes of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams (1886–1945) suffered a...
On Play and Seriousness
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga. Beacon, 1950.“We must emphasize once again that play does not exclude seriousness.” —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1938. The classical Latin adjectives that we see associated with the Latin noun...
Judges and Dons
Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary by Richard Posner. Harvard University Press, 2016. Hardcover, 432 pages, $30.For a still-active judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit who “moonlights” as a law professor, Richard Posner is oddly and...
Memory and Mythmaking
The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 (Citizens and Soldiers) By Nicholas Stargardt Basic Books, 2015. Hardcover, 704 pp., $35. At the end of 1999, Time named Albert Einstein as “Person of the Century.” At a New Year’s Eve celebration held in a German castle...
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.
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.
