The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

Defending the Christian Faith

“In 100 Tough Questions For Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today… David G. Bonagura, Jr. gives bite-sized answers to dozens of big questions about the faith.”

How to Love What is Permanent

“Throughout the book, Gibbs pleads with his readers that we not only think of the soul in terms of salvation but also in terms of health. Good taste won’t save one’s soul. But it will nourish the soul and incline the soul towards virtue much more than the bad taste we will acquire from mediocre things.”

Personalism in the Age of AI

“Personalism is a philosophical movement that places the human person at the center of inquiry, affirming the inherent dignity, value, and uniqueness of each individual. While it spans both religious and secular traditions, its common thread is a commitment to defending the irreducible reality of the person in an age increasingly shaped by systems, technologies, and abstractions.”

Christopher Dawson and Pluralism

“In particular, I want to examine three aspects of Dawson’s thought: his conclusion that cultures, especially Western culture, historically have been pluralist; his contention that a pluralism of cultures preserves a sphere of freedom from dominant modern ideologies that would eliminate that freedom; and finally, Dawson’s conviction that a pluralist world represents a new opportunity for evangelization.”

Florentines, Politics, and Virtue

Dialogue on the Government of Florence by Francesco Guicciardini, edited by Alison Brown. Cambridge University Press, [1527] 1994. Paperback, 256 pages, $40.The city of Florence rocks with political agitation. Just a few months earlier, her citizens had endured an...

Some of the Right Questions

Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Is Doing Away with Itself) by Thilo Sarrazin. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010. Almost five years have passed since Thilo Sarrazin published his book Germany does away with itself, a...

Much Ado About Nothing—or Something

Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Is Doing Away with Itself) by Thilo Sarrazin. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010. Rarely has a book caused so much controversy and upset in the cohorts of Germany’s well-to-do and politically Left...

Why a New Sonnet about a Medieval English Monarch Is Worth Reading

In this age of self-absorption, of ubiquitous small screens and self-important postings—narcissism run rampant—many contemporary poems are often deeply personal, about impulses and emotions, as opposed to poems about public events that transcend the poet’s individual...

Johnson’s Churchill: A Mythic Figure for Our Age

The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. by Boris Johnson. New York: Riverhead Books, 2014. Hardcover, 400 pages, $28.Reviewed by John P. Rossi Is there a need for yet another book on Winston Churchill? My university library with a modest number of volumes has...

Eight Conservative Historians

Eight Conservative Historians

History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan by Reba N. Soffer. Oxford University Press, 2009. Hardcover, 345 pages, $125. Reviewed by John M. Vella Having written several essays on British conservative...

Epistolary Gems

The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–1931 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. London: Faber & Faber, 2014; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 878 pages, $45/$85. “If I could destroy every letter I have ever written in my life I would do...

Naming Crimethink

The first three months of 2015 at the Bookman have been busy, and fruitful. We continue to feature reviews of books and ideas that further our defense of the Permanent Things. The current scene embodies much of what Orwell called crimethink. Ideas that were...

Studying Man and Making Man

The Logic of the Cultural Sciences by Ernst Cassirer, translated by S. G. Lofts. Yale University Press, [1942] 2000. Paperback, 190 pages, $22.Few debates have remained as persistent in our times as the controversy over the respective provinces of the sciences and the...

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

How to Love What is Permanent
Sarah Reardon on "Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity" by Joshua Gibbs.
@CirceInstitute

Personalism in the Age of AI Grant R. Martsolf on "Personalism for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of David Walsh" Edited by Thomas W. Holman and Richard Avramenko.
@RLPublisher

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