The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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.”

Geopolitics and the Making of the Modern World

“Brands’s book should find a ready audience among those interested in developments in the international scene over the last century. It is particularly effective in dealing with the threat that China’s emerging power and influence pose to the West today…”

The Context for Human Dignity

“While the twentieth century was still sporadically marked by remnants of Christian influence and dominance, the twenty-first has seen the final divorce of the secular and sacred, and the consequences are evident. What Leo XIII warned of, the evils he battled, have been let loose, paradigmatically captured by Artificial Intelligence which poorly imitates and devalues that which makes us essentially human… We would do well then to read Hittinger’s book in reflecting on how to face these challenges.”

Between Greatness and Hubris

“At the core of [the book] is the notion that while America is an exceptional nation, we are not immune from the perils that beset past countries and empires.”

Evangelicals and Conservatives: On Beyond Worldview

by Staff | Jun 1, 2014

The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life by Bradley G. Green. Crossway, 2010. Paperback, 192 pages, $17.The relationship between conservatism in the United States and Protestant evangelicals is puzzling. Historians who study the rise of...

The Centennial of a Cataclysm: One Life, One Family

by Staff | May 26, 2014

“To you from failing hands we throw The Torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields,” 1915 One hundred summers ago, one of history’s greatest...

Today’s Totalitarians

by Thomas F. Bertonneau | May 25, 2014

Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It by James Kalb. Angelico Press, 2013. Paperback, 203 pages, $20.In his latest book, James Kalb has produced, among many other things, a phenomenology of the...

America’s Aviation Icons

by Robert Huddleston | May 19, 2014

The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight by Winston Groom. National Geographic Press, 2013. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30.The young person at Barnes & Noble who led me to the stack of The Aviators, drew a blank...

Paul Elmer More and the Relevance of Life and Letters

by Staff | May 19, 2014

Paul Elmer More, once described as the most “patrician” of American critics, together with Harvard professor Irving Babbitt, founded the short-lived Humanist school of criticism. The name they took for themselves alluded to the spirit of the ancient litterae...

‘I Think I Have Made Poetry’

by James E. Person Jr | May 12, 2014

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920 Edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 811 pages, $45. In a conversation with the late literary scholar Peter J. Stanlis about ten years ago, Stanlis...

The Problem of Democratic Individualism

by Staff | May 12, 2014

In this item from 1988, Peter Augustine Lawler looks at both Tocqueville and Robert Bellah to illuminate the problem of democratic individualism.

Turner’s Frontier Thesis, Continued

by Staff | May 5, 2014

The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History by Jon K. Lauck. University of Iowa Press, 2013. Paperback, 166 pages, $35.Let me say at the outset that for me the only definitive “Trails Conference” is the one that occurs toward the end of Zane Grey’s The...

Bully in the Bully Pulpit

by Chuck Chalberg | May 5, 2014

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster, 2013. Hardcover,928 pages, $40.Has this country had a providential history? Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin must be tempted to think...