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.

From the Man Who Loved America

“Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy.”

Smithian Wisdom on Demand

“Even readers who disagree with the collection’s broad normative valence will find that it consistently models a way of reading Smith as a unified thinker about persons-in-society—morally formed agents embedded in evolving rules, conventions, and institutions.”

In Praise of Poetry and Form

“Majmudar often takes the long view, and from the long view, free verse is a new arrival in a variegated poetic history that stretches back into prehistory. To embrace it alone is to cut oneself off from that sweeping history and from the resources to be found there. There is still vitality in these neglected traditions. They are not a dead past.”

A Terrible Beauty

Displacement by Derek Turner. Endeavour Press, 2015. E-book, 1054 Kb, $3. The huge majority of novelists who set themselves up as radicals are really anything but. It’s been observed that, with authors like Nabokov, the last literary taboos were broken, and all...

Resisting Delusions

Chance or Reality and Other Essays by Stanley L. Jaki. University Press of America, 1986. 258 pp., $14.50 paper.The dominant pathological feature of our times often seems an adulation of growth. That bigger is better and that the self is to be fulfilled are...

A Literary Bloodhound Tracks Eliot

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Hardcover, 493 + xvi pages, $35. As I finished this prodigious tome about “Tom,” a painful question came to mind. What American could have pulled it off? The ideal...

Learning What We Don’t Know

The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World by Robert P. Waxler. Bloomsbury, 2014. Paper, 191 pages, $30. I begin with a trigger warning. The following review contains references that could evoke strong feelings about the nature...

The Heritage of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Hardcover, 176 pages, $24.Reviewed by Helen AndrewsWhen he set out to interview James Baldwin for his oral history of the civil rights movement, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), Robert Penn Warren...

An Old Tale, Retold

Grendel by John Gardner. Vintage, 1971, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, $14. Reviewed by Pedro Blas González Importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite. Expression, however—listen closely now—expression is founded on the finite occasion. John...

A Glimpse of Something Lost

America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928 by Booth Tarkington, edited by Jeremy Beer. Front Porch Republic Books, 2015. Paperback, 270 pages, $32. Just prior to this book’s arrival, I had acceded to a friend’s impassioned, insistent...

A Certain Cold Grandeur

On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller by Richard Norton Smith. Random House, 2014. Hardcover, 842 pages, $38.Looking back during his final years, Nelson Rockefeller declared his life a failure in that he had not become president of the United States. He had...

Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer

Video of a seminar on "Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer" at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature at Michigan State University, June 2, 2015.A panel on "Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer" took place at the annual meeting of the...

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.

The first piece in our special series focusing on Russell Kirk’s work on America is out! https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/what-the-american-revolution-secured-order-justice-and-freedom/ thank you @lsheahan @ubookman

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