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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

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...

Too Much Reality?

Amends: A Novel by Eve Tushnet. CreateSpace, 2015. Paper, 330 pages, $14.Eve Tushnet’s self-published debut novel Amends is at full gallop out of the gate: J. Malachi MacCool was born in Berkeley, California, in the last decade of the Cold War, to parents who deserved...

A Circle of Instigators

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015. 644 pp., $35.00 cloth.Evelyn Waugh once complained that during the twentieth century, certain literary coteries had “ganged up and captured” an age’s...

The Start of the Division of Europe

After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe by Michael Jones. New American Library, 2015. Hardcover, pp. 374, $28. On 30 April 1945, when Russian troops were but four hundred yards away from his underground headquarters, Adolf Hitler killed himself. The...

A Lived, not ‘Living’ Constitution

The Constitution: An Introduction by Michael S. Paulsen and Luke Paulsen. Basic Books, 2015. Hardcover, 368 pages, $30.A wonderful initiation to the nation's charter, The Constitution: An Introduction provides insights into not only the document itself, but the...

After Consensus Ends

A conversation with with James Piereson.The University Bookman is pleased to present this discussion with James Piereson on his recent book, Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order, from Encounter Books. Mr. Piereson is president...

The Warrior for Free Government

Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government By Larry P. Arnn. Nelson Books, 2015. Hardcover, 376 pp., $23.Winston Churchill served fifty years in the British House of Commons, was Prime Minister twice, served in several British...

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.

To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor

Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress

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