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.

William F. Buckley Jr.: Literary Figure 

“…the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it.”

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.”

Revisiting Walter Lippmann

“Lippmann sought to be—and was—what might be described today as an influencer. As such, he never sought to wield power, but he long desired to have the ears and eyes of the powerful. Arnold-Forster is certainly not unaware of that. But it is never his central message. If there is such a message in these pages, and there is, it is his effort to make the reader aware that Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of the efficacy of progressive government, was also Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of both the reality and importance of empire in general and of the American empire in particular.”

Family Homes and Drive-in Churches

“After the optimism of the suburban boom, it all went bust. Mass attendance fell by 70 percent. Women’s religious life died out. Parochial education was crippled… The green grass of suburbia was starved into a desiccated, brown waste.”

William F. Buckley Jr.: Literary Figure 

“…the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it.”

Studies in Burke and His Time

Studies in Burke and His Time

Welcome to Studies in Burke and His Time, the journal of the Edmund Burke Society of America. Our journal editors are Elizabeth Lambert and Michael Brown, and the executive editor is Ian Crowe. Please direct all articles, review submissions, and correspondence in the...

(The Future of) Liberalism in Our Disordered Age

Post-Liberalism: The Death of a Dream by Melvyn L. Fein. Transaction Press, 2012. Cloth, 359 pages, $40.Reality is never as we think of it. Yet we must live, act, think, choose, and find our place within some story about reality that purports to lay out the...

Prog Rock and the Permanent Things: More with Bradley Birzer

Prog Rock and the Permanent Things: More with Bradley Birzer

This is the second of two parts of a conversation with Bradley Birzer, who holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair of American Studies at Hillsdale College and is one of his generation’s most important scholars of conservative thought and the tradition of Christian...

Think Local, Act Local

How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism by Roger Scruton. Oxford University Press, 2012. Hardcover, 464 pages, $30.The political left has long dominated the modern environmental movement. British philosopher Roger Scruton...

A Church of One

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry. Viking, 2012, Cloth, 480 pages, $35. Puritans came to America wanting to found a church more faithful to their beliefs. But they had a problem. In...

An Exercise in Polemic

The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800, by Conor Cruise O’Brien. University of Chicago Press, 1996, 367 pp., $30 cloth.In The Long Affair, Conor Cruise O’Brien challenges professional historians’ hagiographic assessment of America’s...

Welcome New Readers

We're delighted to have many new readers on the site this week. Welcome! Please browse around the site and follow us on Twitter @ubookman or sign up for our mailing list, above.

Hope or Despair? Roger Kimball and the Future of Culture

The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia by Roger Kimball. St. Augustine’s Press, 2012. Hardcover, 360 pp., $35. For those who cherish the life of the mind, one of the saddest events of 2012 was the death of the great historian Jacques...

The Book Gallery

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

@ubookman The mission of @ubookman is to identify and discuss those books that diagnose the modern age through the prism of the Permanent Things and so to support cultural renewal. Thanks for joining Bookman writers and readers to do our part to redeem the time. https://buff.ly/6uf2yRz

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman