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.”

Resisting Delusions

Chance or Reality and Other Essays by Stanley L. Jaki. University Press of America, 1986. 258 pp., $14.50 paper.The dominant pathological feature of our times often seems an adulation of growth. That bigger is better and that the self is to be fulfilled are...

A Literary Bloodhound Tracks Eliot

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Hardcover, 493 + xvi pages, $35. As I finished this prodigious tome about “Tom,” a painful question came to mind. What American could have pulled it off? The ideal...

Learning What We Don’t Know

The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World by Robert P. Waxler. Bloomsbury, 2014. Paper, 191 pages, $30. I begin with a trigger warning. The following review contains references that could evoke strong feelings about the nature...

The Heritage of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Hardcover, 176 pages, $24.Reviewed by Helen AndrewsWhen he set out to interview James Baldwin for his oral history of the civil rights movement, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), Robert Penn Warren...

An Old Tale, Retold

Grendel by John Gardner. Vintage, 1971, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, $14. Reviewed by Pedro Blas González Importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite. Expression, however—listen closely now—expression is founded on the finite occasion. John...

A Glimpse of Something Lost

America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928 by Booth Tarkington, edited by Jeremy Beer. Front Porch Republic Books, 2015. Paperback, 270 pages, $32. Just prior to this book’s arrival, I had acceded to a friend’s impassioned, insistent...

A Certain Cold Grandeur

On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller by Richard Norton Smith. Random House, 2014. Hardcover, 842 pages, $38.Looking back during his final years, Nelson Rockefeller declared his life a failure in that he had not become president of the United States. He had...

Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer

Video of a seminar on "Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer" at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature at Michigan State University, June 2, 2015.A panel on "Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer" took place at the annual meeting of the...

Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer

A panel on "Russell Kirk as a Midwestern Writer" took place at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature on June 2, 2015 at Michigan State University. Jon Lauck was the moderator and presentations were made by Gleaves Whitney, James...

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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