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.”

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,...

Neuhaus Described, If Not Explained

Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square by Randy Boyagoda. Image, 2015. Hardcover, 480 pages, $30.From the mid-1960s up until his death in 2009, Richard John Neuhaus was one of America’s leading clergymen and public intellectuals. In his new biography, Randy...

Mis-Judging Law, Meaning, and Justice

Judging Statutes by Robert A. Katzmann. Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 184 pages, $25.It is safe to say that, with some notable exceptions (for example, Chief Justice Roberts’s 2012 opinion saving Obamacare from itself by substituting the word “tax” for the...

Rehabilitating MacArthur

The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur by Mark Perry. Basic Books, 2014. Hardcover, 380 pages, $30. Supreme Commander: MacArthur’s Triumph in Japan by Seymour Morris, Jr. Harper Collins, 2014. Hardcover, 363 pages, $27. The historical...

Birzer on Kirk

An interview with Brad Birzer, incumbent of the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College, is the feature article in the most recent issue of Religion and Liberty from the Acton Institute. Birzer discusses his new biography, Russell Kirk: A Conservative...

Lubbers on the Liberal Arts

Listen or read here as Arend D. Lubbers, Grand Valley State University President Emeritus and longest serving college president in the country, speaks on the importance of a liberal arts education. President Lubbers has been a longtime friend of the Kirk family and...

Lubbers on the Liberal Arts

A video of a talk on the importance of a liberal arts education by Arend D. Lubbers, President Emeritus of Grand Valley State University.Listen as Arend D. Lubbers, Grand Valley State University President Emeritus and the longest-serving college president in the...

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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