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.
Paul Elmer More and the Relevance of Life and Letters
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’
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
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
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
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...
Books in Little
A Second Look at First Things: A Case for Conservative Politics. Edited by Francis J. Beckwith, Robert P. George, and Susan McWilliams. St. Augustine’s Press, 2013. Paperback, 400 pages. Hadley P. Arkes must indeed feel vindicated by this work. An intelligent...
The Real Source of Modern Judicial Review
Dred Scott v. SandfordModern judicial review has a curious history. Its proponents seek to find its origins in the 1803 case of Marbury vs. Madison. The argument is that Chief Justice John Marshall “cleverly” created judicial review as an American institution. As the...
The Founders’ Founder
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. A Critical Edition with Modern Spelling by Richard Hooker, edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Three volumes. Hardcover, 1100 pages, $420. If asked “Which thinker exerted the greatest influence...
On Incomprehensibles
The literary form of Pascal’s Pensées is something of a puzzle. Is it a series of jottings, aphorisms, short essays, even conversational letters, or all of the above? Whatever it is, it is a remarkable work bordering on the inexhaustible. Not unlike Boswell’s Life of...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
