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.”

ISI video draws on Kirk’s thought

The Intercollegiate Review has published a short video with Robert Reilly that was shot at Mecosta last summer. In it, Bob Reilly draws on Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order to explain why “America is older than you think.” The video is just two minutes long,...

Five Girls, Two Nations, One Historical Imagination

Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back by Janice P. Nimura. W. W. Norton, 2015. Hardcover, 352 pages, $28.Two days before Christmas, 1871, a delegation of Japanese pioneers left the port of Yokohama on the paddlewheel steamship SS America,...

An Unfinished Memoir

Intrepid Woman: Betty Lussier’s Secret War, 1942–1945 by Betty Lussier. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010. Hardcover, 240 pages, $35.Betty Lussier was born in Canada but raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her father, born in the U.S. but a Canadian citizen,...

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...

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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