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.”

Straussians, Founders, and the Faith

by Staff | Nov 24, 2013

Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique by Grant Havers. Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 256 pp., $37. Grant Havers’s study of the Straussian persuasion may be too relentlessly honest to win applause from mainstream...

Better Average Than Unequal

by Gene Callahan | Nov 17, 2013

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen. New York, NY: Dutton, 2013. Hardcover, 290 pages, $26.95.In his latest book, Tyler Cowen takes up where The Great Stagnation, his penultimate work, left off. If America’s economy...

On W. C. Fields’s Tombstone

by James V. Schall, S. J. | Nov 15, 2013

In Joseph Epstein’s recent book, Essays in Biography, we find a chapter entitled “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.” It is obviously an essay devoted to the great comedian W. C. Fields. I have often wondered: What would happen to me if I did not take Field’s famous...

Contradictions and the Burkean … Lovecraft?

by Staff | Nov 10, 2013

The Classic Horror Stories by H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Roger Luckhurst. Oxford University Press, 2013. Hardcover, xxxvi + 487 pages, $25. Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890–1937) is, after Poe, the most important and influential American writer of horror fiction. This,...

Capital Vices and Commercial Virtues

by Staff | Nov 6, 2013

Capital: A novel by John Lanchester. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012. Hardcover, 527 pages, $27.This sprawling account of a year in the lives of a variety of people connected in some way to a London neighborhood in the period leading up to and into the global...

‘Only Power Restrains Power’

by Francis P. Sempa | Nov 3, 2013

James Burnham’s The Machiavellians at Seventy. Seventyyears ago, James Burnham, in the middle of his intellectual odyssey from Marxism to conservatism, wrote an insightful and timeless study of politics and the nature of political power in a book entitled The...

Forget the Enlightenment—Focus on the Family

by Staff | Oct 28, 2013

How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt. Templeton Press, 2013. Hardcover, 268 pages, $21. The influence of Christianity is noticeably waning throughout the West. As a result, Judeo-Christian tenets and principles that have long been in force are steadily—and...

The Voice of Michael Oakeshott in the Conversation of Conservatism

by Staff | Oct 20, 2013

A paper presented to the biennial meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado, September 28, 2013. by Wilfred M. McClay My title refers, of course, to Oakeshott’s celebrated essay, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation...

History in A Secular Age

by Staff | Oct 13, 2013

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad S. Gregory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. Hardcover, 574 pages, $40. In The Unintended Reformation, Brad S. Gregory argues that today’s Western world...