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 Urbanity of Russell Kirk

“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”

Marxism and the Rising Generation

“Gonzalez and Gorka have performed an important service in bringing together a wide range of fact and theory and in establishing a coherent line stretching directly from Marx through many important figures to the present day.”

Cracking the Code to Civilization

“In a world flooded with online influencers, ‘red pill’ rhetoric, and algorithmic posturing, Newell offers something older, wiser, and far superior: a code of manliness rooted in the Western tradition of virtue, character, and service. His message is that true manliness is not a pose or performance; it is the integration of moral and intellectual excellence, what he calls ‘the manly heart.’”

France and the Problem of Abstraction

“…French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, ‘a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.’ But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy.”

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 Multifaceted Kirk

Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer. University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Hardcover, 608 pp., $35.On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered to Allied forces, officially ending World War II. While celebrations swept the United States, one strange young...

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.

Me happily @LawLiberty. Why Robert Nisbet matters as much now as he ever did.

@IVMiles @TheRightsWriter @DanJTPitt @ToryAnarchist @DanHugger @lsheahan @KirkCenter @ubookman @heymiller @Hillsdale @ScotBertram

Hace unos meses tuve el placer de reseñar la nueva edición de "The Social Philosophers" de Robert Nisbet. Lo mejor: se publica en un espacio de referencia para mi @ubookman
Ojalá pronto veamos más obras de este gran sociólogo traducidas en España https://goo.su/5eNFJ

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