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.

Poetry of Transcendence

“A related, and most welcome, theme in Killing Orpheus is memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death. Our lives have become so long, easy, and comfortable that death has become something of an inconvenient truth, which many prefer to ignore or forget. McClatchey is not one of them, thankfully: the collection abounds with reminders of our mortality.”

The Consensus Reality

“In his study of an underlying consensus regarding education, race, and gender, Jonathan Butcher has performed a valuable service for those who wish to understand the true nature of the so-called division within American society today.”

Britain at the Turning Point

“A major theme that runs through Allport’s study is the shifting equilibrium of power relations between the United States and Britain. The war demonstrated that, as British power and resources dwindled, Britain became dependent on material and financial supplies from the United States.”

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...

Epistolary Gems

The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–1931 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. London: Faber & Faber, 2014; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 878 pages, $45/$85. “If I could destroy every letter I have ever written in my life I would do...

Naming Crimethink

The first three months of 2015 at the Bookman have been busy, and fruitful. We continue to feature reviews of books and ideas that further our defense of the Permanent Things. The current scene embodies much of what Orwell called crimethink. Ideas that were...

Studying Man and Making Man

The Logic of the Cultural Sciences by Ernst Cassirer, translated by S. G. Lofts. Yale University Press, [1942] 2000. Paperback, 190 pages, $22.Few debates have remained as persistent in our times as the controversy over the respective provinces of the sciences and the...

Evangelical Culture, Then and Now

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, 25th Anniversary Edition by Randall Balmer. Oxford University Press, 2014. Paperback, 432 pages, $25.To read Randall Balmer’s Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory as an evangelical in 2015,...

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.

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