The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

The Urbanity of Russell Kirk

“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”

Marxism and the Rising Generation

“Gonzalez and Gorka have performed an important service in bringing together a wide range of fact and theory and in establishing a coherent line stretching directly from Marx through many important figures to the present day.”

Cracking the Code to Civilization

“In a world flooded with online influencers, ‘red pill’ rhetoric, and algorithmic posturing, Newell offers something older, wiser, and far superior: a code of manliness rooted in the Western tradition of virtue, character, and service. His message is that true manliness is not a pose or performance; it is the integration of moral and intellectual excellence, what he calls ‘the manly heart.’”

France and the Problem of Abstraction

“…French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, ‘a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.’ But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy.”

Norman Lear, Conservative?

Even This I Get to Experience by Norman Lear. Penguin Press, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $33.British comic novelist and television writer Douglas Adams was once asked to explain the difference between a comic writer and a wit. “A wit will think of a funny response at...

The Whig Theory of Christianity

Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $35. In its basic assumptions, liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity. It emerged as the moral institutions...

Virgil Through the Centuries

The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid, by Philip Hardie. I.B. Tauris, 2014, 256 pp., $35.Virgil’s Aeneid, the Roman national epic that recounts the mythic origins of the Eternal City, is among the most influential and widely read books in...

Spring Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2015) has just been posted. It features news on the recent Edmund Burke Society conference and other recent visitors and scholars at the Kirk Center. You can download it, and past issues, here.

What We’re Reading (Summer 2015)

From Waterloo to Palomar, from children’s fiction to philosophy, our contributors and friends again provide their summer reading lists. Eve Tushnet I hope to spend this summer soaking up the sun with Los Bros. Hernandez’s epic comic book series “Love and Rockets.” The...

Norman Mailer and the End of Journalism

Judge compares Norman Mailer, a leading light in the New Journalism, to his successors today. Beyond mere bias is a deeper reason for the decline of journalism: the end of journalistic boot camp.

The Holiness of Hobbitry

Tolkien’s Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle-earth by Craig Bernthal. Angelico Press, 2014. Paperback, 316 pages, $17. In 1999, Joseph Pearce lamented that J. R. R. Tolkien “is not generally perceived to be one of the key protagonists of the Catholic...

A Conservative Manifesto for Europe

A Conservative Manifesto for Europe

Zeitgeist & Headwinds: A Conservative Manifesto [Original German: Zeitgeist und Gegenwind—Ein konservatives Manifest] by Florian Stumfall. Hemau, Germany: Tangrintler Medienhaus, 2011. Hardcover, 243 pages, €25.Florian Stumfall is a seasoned Christian German...

On Cocktail Time

In 1958, P. G. Wodehouse published Cocktail Time, one of his “Uncle Fred books.” Bertram Wilberforce Wooster does not appear in this book, nor does Jeeves, but Bertie’s friend “Pongo” Twistleton does, as well as a butler by the name of Albert Peasemarch. Pongo’s Uncle...

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.

Me happily @LawLiberty. Why Robert Nisbet matters as much now as he ever did.

@IVMiles @TheRightsWriter @DanJTPitt @ToryAnarchist @DanHugger @lsheahan @KirkCenter @ubookman @heymiller @Hillsdale @ScotBertram

Hace unos meses tuve el placer de reseñar la nueva edición de "The Social Philosophers" de Robert Nisbet. Lo mejor: se publica en un espacio de referencia para mi @ubookman
Ojalá pronto veamos más obras de este gran sociólogo traducidas en España https://goo.su/5eNFJ

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