The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
The Real Great Depression?
The Forgotten Man, Graphic Edition: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes. Harper Perennial, 2014. Paperback, 320 pages, $20.Amity Shlaes does not believe in playing it safe. In 2007 she issued the original edition of The Forgotten Man: A New History...
Teaching in an Age of Ideology
What does it mean to teach in an age of ideology? At first glance, especially for conservatives, the answer appears to be obvious: to advocate for conservative ideas and principles against the prevailing ideologies of relativism, feminism, multiculturalism, and other...
Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Coming of the First World War
The American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan called the First World War the “seminal catastrophe of [the twentieth] century.” Between 1914 and 1918, the major powers of Western civilization waged brutal and unrelenting war against each other, resulting in the...

Betrayal of the Arab Christians
The Last Communion: A Journey among the Abandoned Christians in the Arab World. By Klaus Wivel. Kristeligt Dagblads Forlag (Denmark), 2013. Paperback, 320 pages. In 2011 in the Danish weekly Weekendavisen, journalist Klaus Wivel published an open letter to the foreign...
The Philosophies of the Modern Era and the Catholic Church
The Church and the Culture of Modernity By R. J. Divozzo. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011. Paperback, 404 pages, $15.25.Richard Divozzo’s The Church and the Culture of Modernity provides a insightful study of the root causes of the decline in public...
Multiculturalism or Clash of Civilizations
The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism by Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederick Stjernfelt. Telos Press, 2012. Paperback, 410 pages, $25. This is an important, even a courageous book, as it challenges the now-hallowed idea of multiculturalism. It examines the...
The Future of the West in the Thought of Muggeridge and Ortega y Gasset
Both Muggeridge and Ortega y Gasset argue in different ways that modern intellectuals have turned their back on freedom because it makes great demands on people who find the idea of moral responsibility too taxing.
The Critic as Catalyst
The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987. Edited by Hans Bak. Harvard University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 848 pages, $40. Hans Bak rightly calls Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) the “chronicler of the lost generation.” His pioneering literary history,...
What We’re Reading (Summer 2014)
From medieval sagas to anti-Communist Japanese surrealist novels, the Civil War campaigns to contemporary fiction, our contributors and friends again provide their summer reading lists. Every year this is one of our most popular features, as the suggestions from our...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.