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.”

The Marxist Jeremiah

Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 234 pages, $26.There are few polemicists writing in the English language today as erudite, or as pugnacious, as Terry Eagleton. Nor are there many public intellectuals who so defy...

Fiction and Philosophy

On Moral Fiction, by John Gardner. Basic Books, 1977. When you make up a story about America and say that we are the worst killers of all, that we are worse than Russia or China, then . . . well, I think you’ve made up an evil story.” That evaluation of the integrity...

Science Fiction Worth Re-Reading?

What Makes This Book so Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Jo Walton. Tor, 2014. Hardcover, 447 pages, $27.Insofar as “genre” means commercial formula-fiction, it is safe to say that between the late nineteenth century, when the formulas...

An Echo from the Cold War

The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven For Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2014. Hardcover, 231 pages (plus acknowledgments, notes, and index), $28. Write a nonfiction history to read like a novel—offering suspense, interesting...

Kirk in the Clarion Review

Russell Kirk’s autobiographical essay, “Is Life Worth Living” is featured in The Clarion Review this month.

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...

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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