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.
Creating in Community
Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings by Diana P. Glyer. Kent State University Press, 2015. Paperback, 224 pages, $19.There is no shortage of books on the authors who made up the best known writing group of the...
A Poet Aware of the Past
Most Ancient of All Splendors, by Johann Moser. Sophia Institute Press, 1989. Hardcover, 94 pages, $15. It was difficult to believe, until this book arrived at my desk, that in this fin de siècle of computers, word processors, videos, and other robots, poems still are...
An Anti-Utopian Life
Isaiah Berlin: A Life, by Michael Ignatieff. New York: Owl Books, 1999. Paper, 356pp., $16. Isaiah Berlin, who died in 1997, was that rare man of letters who was also a man of the world. If Churchill was the statesman who earned laurels as an historian, Berlin was the...
On What Is Not Found in English Departments
“English as It’s Taught” by Joseph Epstein, in A Literary Education and Other Essays. Axios Press, 2014. pages 335-40 (of 537).In A Literary Education and Other Essays is found Joseph Epstein’s 2011 review, “English as It’s Taught” in The Cambridge History of the...
A Champion of Inherited Culture
The Intemperate Professor and Other Cultural Splenetics, by Russell Kirk. Sherwood Sugden and Company, 1988. 143pp. paper, $7.95. H. L. Mencken once said that the college professor, “menaced by the timid dogmatism of the plutocracy above him and the incurable...
Kissinger as Political Philosopher
Kissinger 1923–1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson. New York: Penguin Press, 2015. Hardcover, 986 pp., $39.95. Henry Kissinger has been called many things in his long, eventful public career, but “idealist” is not one of them. Until now. The first volume of the...
Schopenhauer and Postmodern Ethical Affectation
González reminds us of the uncomfortable lessons that the grouch of Danzig could teach our age.
The Meaning of Capitalism
TO THE POINT: FRIDAY, WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 1963Did you know that “capitalism” is a term coined by Karl Marx? Like most Marxist terms, it is loaded, and misleading to employ. So I never advocate or defend the abstraction called “capitalism”: rather, I favor a reasonably...
Our Wisest President
TO THE POINT: FRIDAY, JULY 31, 1964Tardily, historians and the intelligent public are coming to realize that the most intelligent, as well as most learned, man ever to inhabit the White House was sardonic old John Adams. Unlike the “advanced thinkers” of his time,...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
