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.
Words and Deeds
Maya Angelou (1928–2014)There is a scene near the end of Old Goriot in which the young Rastignac, still new to Paris and Parisian society, observes that “[n]oble natures cannot dwell in this world.” In Balzac’s eponymous novel, Goriot, having literally given...
An Integrated Vision
Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics, by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr. Bucknell University Press, 1999. 320pp., $48.50 cloth. The title of this book, intriguing though it is, may seem forbidding and suggestive of recondite subject matter. Certainly, it is a...
The 2015 Burke Conference
The Edmund Burke Society of America invites you to its third conference, “Edmund Burke and Patriotism” to be held at Villanova University on February 27–28, 2015. The conference aims to trace the development in the relationship between patriotism, liberty, and duty...
Third Burke Conference Announced!
The Edmund Burke Society of America is pleased to announce a call for papers and open registration for “Edmund Burke and Patriotism,” their third conference on Edmund Burke. It will be held on February 27 and 28, 2015 at Villanova University. Keynote addresses will be...
The Rock Star of One First Street
Scalia: A Court of One by Bruce Allen Murphy. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Cloth, 656 pp., $35.This is an unusual book. One has the feeling that the author does not really care for his subject, but, in spite of himself, Bruce Allen Murphy, the Fred Morgan Kirby...
Coke and the Western Legal Tradition
Common Law. El pensamiento político y jurídico de Sir Edward Coke (Common Law. The political and juridical thought of Sir Edward Coke) by Elio A. Gallego García. Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 2012. Paperback, 204 pages, $24.Has the past still something to tell us? Is...
The Ever-Living Progressive Constitution—From Questionable Doctrine to Article of Faith
America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By By Akhil Reed Amar. Basic Books, 2012. Hardcover, 640 pages, $30. Yale Law School’s Akhil Reed Amar is a very intelligent man. He also is a man committed to a particular ideology of the...
Thinking Like Edmund Burke?
The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence. By David Bromwich. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 512 pages, $40. This first installment of a two-volume intellectual biography of Burke is...
A Marvelous Tale
Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 2014. Hardcover, 448 pages, $28. J. R. R. Tolkien’s newly published translation of Beowulf will be of interest to two overlapping groups: on the one hand,...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
