The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.

Would you consider a gift to help us continue this work?

If just 1 in 4 of our readers contributed $10, we’d dramatically increase our capacity to recruit the brightest young writers and tackle more books and topics, all with a Kirkian angle. We’ve set a goal of raising $20k this month in order to continue our mission. Exceeding this amount will allow us to expand our work even more.

If you love the Bookman, and read us with regularity, we’d greatly appreciate your generous support this month.

With gratitude,

Luke Sheahan, Ph.D., editor
The University Bookman

P.S. As a special thank you to all Bookman supporters this month, we’ll send you a link to an audio recording of Ex Tenebris, one of Kirk’s best ghostly short stories. We think you’ll really enjoy it.

Campaign Progress

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

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.

The Brothers Stuart and the Rise of Protestant England

“…Belloc remains a draught of fresh air and a happy antidote to the official version of English national history, with its idealized tale of public-spirited reforms and liberal advances broadening down to the happy present.”

The Fog of the American War for Independence

“Academic and popular history of the period has long noted the early intimidation and violence that accompanied the rise of an American political consciousness and revolutionary movement.”

“To Think Faith” as Educators

“…faith and pedagogy should be in harmony. Smith’s guide is not a theory of faith and teaching or how to sprinkle faith within teaching. ‘It offers repeated practice at noticing and thinking through ways in which faith and the process of teaching might connect in everyday practice,’ in the mundane moments of elementary, secondary, or higher education classrooms.”

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...

A Fair-Minded Polemic

LeoStrauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal by Paul Edward Gottfried. Cambridge, 2013. Paperback, 194 pages, $27. Every year brings a new crop of books about Leo Strauss. The New York Times last year reviewed two, Laurence Lampert’s The...

Liberal Impartiality

The Burke-Paine Controversy: Texts and Criticism, edited by Ray B. Browne. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963. 230 pp. The famous controversy between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine was really not a controversy at all. Burke published his Reflections on the...

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.

Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.

The Audacious Russell Kirk
Bruce P. Frohnen reviews "On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776" by Russell Kirk. Edited by Michael Lucchese.

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