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.”

Fall Newsletter

Fall Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Fall 2015) has just been posted. It features news on the publication of The Politics of Prudence in Croatia, and photos of the host of scholars, students, and visitors who attend the many Kirk Center Programs....

Birzer on Kirk

Russell Kirk: American Conservative, the new biography from Bradley J. Birzer, is now out from the University Press of Kentucky. Lee Edwards reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal and calls it “a beautifully written and deeply insightful biography.” And Wilfred M....

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

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

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...

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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