The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured.

From the Man Who Loved America

“Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy.”

Smithian Wisdom on Demand

“Even readers who disagree with the collection’s broad normative valence will find that it consistently models a way of reading Smith as a unified thinker about persons-in-society—morally formed agents embedded in evolving rules, conventions, and institutions.”

In Praise of Poetry and Form

“Majmudar often takes the long view, and from the long view, free verse is a new arrival in a variegated poetic history that stretches back into prehistory. To embrace it alone is to cut oneself off from that sweeping history and from the resources to be found there. There is still vitality in these neglected traditions. They are not a dead past.”

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.

Conservatism and Decline

The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk. Fifth revised edition. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1973. In 1902, from somewhere on Regent Street, my mother watched Edward VII’s coronation parade. As she saw this gold and scarlet pageant drawn from the...

Happier Cities, Happier Lives?

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 290 pages, $27.This is a fascinating and informative but at the same time maddening book. It contains a wealth of evidence making the case that...

On Having Faces

Recently, I received a letter, post-marked Lima, from a young Peruvian student who had attended Georgetown. She tells me that she has just finished reading C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, a book that I recommend to anyone who will listen. She writes: One of my...

Gottfried Responds

Paul Gottfried responds to Daniel McCarthy’s review of his book on Leo Strauss.Dan McCarthy is to be commended for his fair-minded review of my study of Leo Strauss and Strauss’s influence on the American conservative movement. I hope that Dan’s efforts will have the...

Unamuno: No Evangelist, No Secularist

Unamuno: No Evangelist, No Secularist

The Agony of Christianity by Miguel de Unamuno. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan; annotated by Anthony Kerrigan and Martin Nozick. Vol. 5 in the Bollingen works of Unamuno. Princeton University Press, 1974. $11.00.If, a hundred or a thousand years from now, there are...

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition. Click on the icon in the upper right corner of the video to see more episodes in this series or check out our YouTube page.

@ubookman The series seeks to advance understanding of the significance of the American founding to our times through fresh, concise presentations. The following piece by @ubookman editor @lsheahan sets the stage: https://buff.ly/Aakgs0W

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, @ubookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured.

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