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.”

‘As You Wish’

True (Self-)Love and The Princess BrideThe early Christian theologian Augustine, in The City of God, relates a story of an encounter between Alexander the Great, emperor of the known world, and a common pirate. When Alexander confronts the pirate about his...

Reading Recommendations for 2014

Contributors and friends of the Bookman share books of note from the past year's reading in many different genres.Matthew Boudway, Commonweal Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life is a kind of sequel to his 2008 book Nothing to Be Frighted Of, which was about the various...

Russell Kirk as Historian

Much has been said and written this year about the sixtieth anniversary of publication of Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind. The well deserved attention has, however, generally overlooked a critical facet of the public role of the book and, as important, of Kirk...

Leviathan’s Predictable Servants

Leviathan’s Predictable Servants

The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians by John L. Stewart. Princeton University Press, 1965. Hardcover, 566 pages. The rewriting of the social, political, economic, and legal history of our nation’s most conservative and (from the perspective of “presentist”...

Fall Newsletter

We are pleased to release the Fall 2013 Permanent Things, the latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter, featuring updates on recent events and seminars at the Center—and marking 40 years of ISI seminars at the Center!

Can Rationalism Make it in the Long Run?

Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2012 Hardcover, 250 pages $50. Paperback, 200 pages, $40.Gene Callahan’s Oakeshott on Rome and America brings Oakeshott’s famous critique of Rationalism to bear upon the concrete...

Rescuing Rockwell

American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 512 pages, $28. The art critic Deborah Solomon has performed a rescue operation of the first rank in her new biography, American Mirror: The Life and...

A Reader’s Guide to the Most Brutal Century

A Short History of the Twentieth Century by John Lukacs. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 230 pp. $25. This book is a gem—a highly readable and insightful analysis of what the author, John Lukacs, calls the short twentieth century, which he dates...

An Aesthetic Vision on West 43rd Street

An Evening with the Poet C. P. CavafyOn November 18, 2013 at The Town Hall in New York City, the PEN American Center presented an evening tribute to the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy in celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth. The readers and speakers included the...

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman