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.

William F. Buckley Jr.: Literary Figure 

“…the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it.”

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.”

Revisiting Walter Lippmann

“Lippmann sought to be—and was—what might be described today as an influencer. As such, he never sought to wield power, but he long desired to have the ears and eyes of the powerful. Arnold-Forster is certainly not unaware of that. But it is never his central message. If there is such a message in these pages, and there is, it is his effort to make the reader aware that Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of the efficacy of progressive government, was also Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of both the reality and importance of empire in general and of the American empire in particular.”

Family Homes and Drive-in Churches

“After the optimism of the suburban boom, it all went bust. Mass attendance fell by 70 percent. Women’s religious life died out. Parochial education was crippled… The green grass of suburbia was starved into a desiccated, brown waste.”

William F. Buckley Jr.: Literary Figure 

“…the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it.”

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.

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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