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.

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.”

How to Love What is Permanent

“Throughout the book, Gibbs pleads with his readers that we not only think of the soul in terms of salvation but also in terms of health. Good taste won’t save one’s soul. But it will nourish the soul and incline the soul towards virtue much more than the bad taste we will acquire from mediocre things.”

Personalism in the Age of AI

“Personalism is a philosophical movement that places the human person at the center of inquiry, affirming the inherent dignity, value, and uniqueness of each individual. While it spans both religious and secular traditions, its common thread is a commitment to defending the irreducible reality of the person in an age increasingly shaped by systems, technologies, and abstractions.”

Christopher Dawson and Pluralism

“In particular, I want to examine three aspects of Dawson’s thought: his conclusion that cultures, especially Western culture, historically have been pluralist; his contention that a pluralism of cultures preserves a sphere of freedom from dominant modern ideologies that would eliminate that freedom; and finally, Dawson’s conviction that a pluralist world represents a new opportunity for evangelization.”

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...

Straussians, Founders, and the Faith

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

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

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?

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,...

The Book Gallery

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

How to Love What is Permanent
Sarah Reardon on "Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity" by Joshua Gibbs.
@CirceInstitute

Personalism in the Age of AI Grant R. Martsolf on "Personalism for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of David Walsh" Edited by Thomas W. Holman and Richard Avramenko.
@RLPublisher

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