The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Intellectual Courage and the Bitter Truth
On Essays and LettersIn the handsome new book, The Loss and Recovery of Truth (St. Augustine’s Press), we find a short 1978 essay of Gerhart Niemeyer. It was written on the occasion of two commencement addresses. One was the justly famous Harvard Address of Alexander...
Reconsidering Orwell’s Essays
A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. Doubleday, 1952. [Harcourt, 1970] Reviewed by John P. Rossi George Orwell was the greatest essayist of the twentieth century. Sixty years ago, at the height of his fame as the author of Animal Farm, Orwell published a...

Patrick Dempsey in Forbes: Great or Garish?
Desperately seeking new readers, advertising revenue, and relevance in the new media, such financial stalwarts as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Forbes magazine have in recent years resorted to special supplements that highlight the lives of the...
On Beyond Think Tanks
An interview with writer and filmmaker Mark Judge on the disconnect between popular culture and the conservative movement.
Visions of Order
The Unwinding: an Inner History of the New America by George Packer. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 448 pages, $27.Liberal journalist George Packer has written a conservative book. At least, I found it to be conservative, at its core. In this “inner...

McConnell Seminar and Video
Dr. Gary L. Gregg, Director of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, brought students from the McConnell Center to the Russell Kirk Center on Labor Day weekend to discuss Russell Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind on the 60th anniversary of its...
Can You Hear Me Now?
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Broadway/Random House, 2013. Paper, 368 pages, $16. In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain seeks to create a revolution, and after reading her...
Another Epitaph on American Exceptionalism
Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century by Patrick Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 231 pages, $27.50. This slender volume consists of four essays offering four variations on a single theme. Since “the American century is behind...
Books in Little
Theodore Dalrymple, Farewell Fear (New English Review Press, 2012, 238 pp.) In his most recent book, English essayist Theodore Dalrymple covers a wide range of cultural topics, from good-natured folks who love hedgehogs to personal ads that prompt unrealistic romantic...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.