The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

The Urbanity of Russell Kirk

“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”

Marxism and the Rising Generation

“Gonzalez and Gorka have performed an important service in bringing together a wide range of fact and theory and in establishing a coherent line stretching directly from Marx through many important figures to the present day.”

Cracking the Code to Civilization

“In a world flooded with online influencers, ‘red pill’ rhetoric, and algorithmic posturing, Newell offers something older, wiser, and far superior: a code of manliness rooted in the Western tradition of virtue, character, and service. His message is that true manliness is not a pose or performance; it is the integration of moral and intellectual excellence, what he calls ‘the manly heart.’”

France and the Problem of Abstraction

“…French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, ‘a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.’ But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy.”

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 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...

Evangelicals and Conservatives: On Beyond Worldview

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

“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

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

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

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...

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.

Cracking the Code to Civilization
@CliffordBates12 on "The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country" (2nd Edition) by @waller_newell

Marxism and the Rising Generation
Jeffrey Folks on "NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It" by @Gundisalvus and Katharine Cornell Gorka @EncounterBooks

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