The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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,...
Capital Vices and Commercial Virtues
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’
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
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
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
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...
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...
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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