The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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.”

Geopolitics and the Making of the Modern World

“Brands’s book should find a ready audience among those interested in developments in the international scene over the last century. It is particularly effective in dealing with the threat that China’s emerging power and influence pose to the West today…”

The Context for Human Dignity

“While the twentieth century was still sporadically marked by remnants of Christian influence and dominance, the twenty-first has seen the final divorce of the secular and sacred, and the consequences are evident. What Leo XIII warned of, the evils he battled, have been let loose, paradigmatically captured by Artificial Intelligence which poorly imitates and devalues that which makes us essentially human… We would do well then to read Hittinger’s book in reflecting on how to face these challenges.”

Between Greatness and Hubris 

“At the core of [the book] is the notion that while America is an exceptional nation, we are not immune from the perils that beset past countries and empires.”

The Prospect of an Authentic Conservatism

Prospects for Conservatives: A Compass for Rediscovering the Permanent Things by Russell Kirk, with a new introduction by Bradley J. Birzer. Imaginative Conservative Books, 2013. Hardcover, 278 pages, $25.Russell Kirk’s most spirited work, Prospects for Conservatives...

Civilization in Davy Jones’s Locker

The Emerging Atlantic Culture by Thomas Molnar. Transaction Publishers, 1994. 110pp., $34.95 cloth. Thomas Molnar has never hesitated to say how horrible he finds America, and the razor edge of his dislike is as sharp here as in a dozen earlier books. It is more of a...

How Dwight Became Dwight

Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered by Tadeusz Lewandowski. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2013. Hardcover, 149 pages, $41. So intensely European was the critic Dwight Macdonald’s spirit, so routinely did he use European...

The Old French Wars

The Old French Wars

Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America, 1607–1763, by Douglas B. Leach. Macmillan (Macmillan Wars of the United States), 1973. 556 pp., $14.95.This is a chronicle of the early years of colonial settlement, with emphasis upon the...

Eric Voegelin: A Philosopher’s Journey

In the English-speaking world political philosophy, as traditionally conceived, has been represented by Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott, and Eric Voegelin. While each of these four has made contributions to the various dimensions of philosophizing about...

The Middling Mind

The Middling Mind

The Politics of the Center: The Juste Milieu in Theory and Practice, France and England, 1815–1848, by Vincent E. Starzinger, with a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Russell Kirk. Transaction Books, 1991. Paperback, 181 pages, $19.95. Middlingness, the...

Modesty Is the Best Policy

A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue by Wendy Shalit. The Free Press, 1999. Cloth, 291 pp., $24. What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden. Simon and Schuster, 1999. Cloth, 202 pp., $23.A recent spate of...

Meeting Stalin’s Challenge

Kennan, Lippmann, Burnham, and the Great Strategy Debate in the Early Cold War YearsDuring the late 1940s and early 1950s, in response to repeated Soviet encroachments in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iran, Central Europe, and the Far East, the United States gradually...

“The World’s Last Night”

Provocative titles are meant to, well, provoke. I have always considered C. S. Lewis’s little 1952 book of essays entitled The World’s Last Night (Harcourt) to be one difficult to forget. It takes its title from the last essay in the book, itself redolent of Christian...

The Book Gallery

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

Geopolitics and the Making of the Modern World
John P. Rossi on "The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars and the Making of the Modern World" by Hal Brands. @wwnorton

The Context for Human Dignity
Rev. Joseph Scolaro reviews "On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law" by F. Russell Hittinger. @CUAPress

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