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.

One Man’s Journey to Faith

“Regardless of one’s beliefs, Charles Murray’s [book] must be acknowledged as a notable work. It is a heartfelt account of one man’s (actually, one couple’s) acceptance of religious faith and of Christianity in particular, and while not a work of scholarship, it is informed by extensive reading and decades of thought. Like the work of C.S. Lewis, which inspired Murray’s turn toward Christianity, it is written in an admirably direct and accessible style.”

Yearning and Collapsing

“Joshua Hren has already demonstrated his mastery of probing and satirizing contemporary pathologies in this novel’s predecessor… which was also a tragic drama but filled with more comedic interludes. In this loose yet independent sequel, Hren focuses on three major characters whose broken lives exhibit three cultural phenomena…”

Our Lives in the Panopticon

“Sophisticated and pervasive information manipulation softens the target, and the target is we the people. The goal? Progressivism, of course…”

Irretrievable Eden

Irretrievable Eden

Outside The Gates of Eden By David Middleton. Measure Press, 2023. Hardcover, 114 pages, $25. Reviewed by Madeleine Austin. avid Middleton’s Outside the Gates of Eden is a collection of formal poems rooted in contemplation of the Book of Genesis....

Renewing Our Understanding of True Freedom

Renewing Our Understanding of True Freedom

Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License By Brad Littlejohn. B&H Academic, 2025. Paperback, 192 pages, $22.99. Reviewed by Andrew Fowler. reedom could be Modernity’s most overused yet least understood word. In an...

Abolitionism’s George Washington

Abolitionism’s George Washington

The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father By Caleb Franz. Post Hill Press, 2024. Paperback, 336 pages, $18.99. Reviewed by Peter Biles. he past is like a waterfall, and history is like the glass of water...

Life During Wartime

Life During Wartime

To Go On Living: Stories By Narine Abgaryan. Plough, 2025. Hardcover, 220 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Michial Farmer. odern Westerners live with a delusion. We actually live with a lot of delusions, but perhaps the most insidious one is that the...

The Triumph of Love

The Triumph of Love

Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature By Paul Krause. Stone Tower Press, 2024. Paperback, 227 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. oman Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece Chinatown is not only a classic of film noir, but it is also...

Understanding the Rest of Hemingway’s Iceberg

Understanding the Rest of Hemingway’s Iceberg

Hemingway’s Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction By John Beall.  Louisiana State University Press, 2024.  Hardcover, 310 pages, $50. Reviewed by Sean C. Hadley. n Brad Paisley’s 2005 hit song, “Alcohol,” the country musician sings about...

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien

“Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers.”

Catholic Zen

Catholic Zen

“Walsh’s philosophy is timely. For the Christian, it’s imperative to try to understand the mystery of the Trinity and always will be, so theology of the person is destined to be a never-completed project. For everybody else, the question of the person has invaded our daily lives. Invaded is the wrong word, of course. The person is always there, but occasionally we glimpse deeply the persons that are woven into our lives. Disputations on abortion and euthanasia reduce to warring conceptions of the person, and now artificial intelligence challenges commonplace understandings of persons and relationships.”

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.

"In an age when so many of our inherited institutions seem to be unraveling under the pressures of a restless, self-regarding individualism, it is a rare and welcome thing to encounter a book that speaks with quiet conviction about the things that have long sustained the American

"If classical teachers believe that truth, beauty, and goodness can indeed change the world, then the sort of student (and teacher and school) described by @AnthonyEsolen is a net gain for this world. And his Classical Catechism serves as a helpful tool in building the necessary

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman