The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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,...
Progressives and the Booboisie
The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class by Fred Siegel. Encounter Books, 2014. Hardcover, 240 pages, $24.What do H. L. Mencken and Barack Obama have in common? Not much, it would seem. The sage of Baltimore was skeptical of all...
Books in Little
The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government by Philip K. Howard. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. 257 pages, $24. It is obvious that the current system of government is failing—higher expenses, increased waste, and little (if any)...
American Religious Freedom: The Revised Story
The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom by Steven D. Smith. Harvard University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 240 pages, $40. In legal scholarship, as in any literature, style matters as much as content. The subjects authors explore, their manners and patterns of...
The Humanistic Tradition in Literature
Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative by James Seaton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 225 pages, $90.Back when I was a pimple-faced graduate student in English and law, I ordered a book from Amazon titled...
How Progressive Is Berlin?
Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom edited by Bruce Baum and Robert Nichols. Routledge, 2013. Hardcover, 284 pages, $130. Among Anglophone political theorists who lived in the twentieth century, Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) stood out for the breadth of his...
The Real Great Depression?
The Forgotten Man, Graphic Edition: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes. Harper Perennial, 2014. Paperback, 320 pages, $20.Amity Shlaes does not believe in playing it safe. In 2007 she issued the original edition of The Forgotten Man: A New History...
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.
@ubookman The series seeks to advance understanding of the significance of the American founding to our times through fresh, concise presentations. The following piece by @ubookman editor @lsheahan sets the stage: https://buff.ly/Aakgs0W
Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, @ubookman 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.
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