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.
Can America Find Order?
An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History, by Rowland Berthoff. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.A principal difficulty in writing significant social history is the necessity to harmonize certain diverse elements: the descriptive, or exposition...
Unveiling the Obvious
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. Yale University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 376 pages, $25.To listen to many contemporary atheists, it would seem that the question of whether or not God exists is meaningless. It is not so much...
‘Love Divine’: Remembering Gerhart Niemeyer
In his book Between Nothingness and Paradise, Gerhart Niemeyer wrote: [T]he great confrontation with political irrationality in our time has not the character of a debate or even discussion. The prerequisite for either would be a common universe of reason which is...
Hoover’s Crusade Against Collectivism
George H. Nash, historian and biographer of Herbert Hoover, speaks with the Bookman about his new book, a previously unknown memoir from the former president. He discusses what The Crusade Years adds to our knowledge about Hoover and the post-war years, and suggests lessons we can draw from his long post-presidential career.
An Extraordinary Book
Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States: The Attack on Leviathan, by Donald Davidson, with a new introduction by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers, [1938] 1991. xxiii + 368 pp., $33.In the year 1990, half the peoples of the world have risen to strike a...
The first Bookman e-book!
In honor of the great historian John Lukacs, who turns ninety in 2014, we are delighted to announce publication of the first e-book from the University Bookman. The Bookman on John Lukacs features essays and reviews by and about Lukacs gathered from fifty years of our...
Hollow Men and the Search for a Workable Pluralism
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief by George M. Marsden. Basic Books, 2014. Hardcover, 264 pp. $27. Randall Jarrell once observed that “The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow...
The Rebirth of a Christian State
The Byzantine Revival, 780–842, by Warren Treadgold. Stanford University Press, 1988, 504 pp., $49.50. In the year 146 B.C. Scipio Aemilianus, adopted grandson of the conqueror of Hannibal and son of the conqueror of Macedonia, watched Rome’s great enemy, Carthage,...
Pop Culture Mysticism
Conservative outlets will occasionally run a light piece about how this movie or that pop song is actually conservative, as if they had found a gold coin in a landfill of dung. In fact, religious mysticism, if not Republican dogma, radiates through the popular culture. And we are missing it.
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
