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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

Patrick Dempsey in Forbes: Great or Garish?

Patrick Dempsey in Forbes: Great or Garish?

Desperately seeking new readers, advertising revenue, and relevance in the new media, such financial stalwarts as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Forbes magazine have in recent years resorted to special supplements that highlight the lives of the...

On Beyond Think Tanks

An interview with writer and filmmaker Mark Judge on the disconnect between popular culture and the conservative movement.

Visions of Order

The Unwinding: an Inner History of the New America by George Packer. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 448 pages, $27.Liberal journalist George Packer has written a conservative book. At least, I found it to be conservative, at its core. In this “inner...

McConnell Seminar and Video

McConnell Seminar and Video

Dr. Gary L. Gregg, Director of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, brought students from the McConnell Center to the Russell Kirk Center on Labor Day weekend to discuss Russell Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind on the 60th anniversary of its...

Can You Hear Me Now?

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Broadway/Random House, 2013. Paper, 368 pages, $16. In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain seeks to create a revolution, and after reading her...

Another Epitaph on American Exceptionalism

Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century by Patrick Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 231 pages, $27.50. This slender volume consists of four essays offering four variations on a single theme. Since “the American century is behind...

Books in Little

Theodore Dalrymple, Farewell Fear (New English Review Press, 2012, 238 pp.) In his most recent book, English essayist Theodore Dalrymple covers a wide range of cultural topics, from good-natured folks who love hedgehogs to personal ads that prompt unrealistic romantic...

Characterizing the Two Britains

Sea Changes by Derek Turner. Washington Summit Publishers, 2012. Paperback, 456 pages, $23. “And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. In another second Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the...

Reading C. S. Lewis from the Inside Out

C. S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet by Alister McGrath. Tyndale, 2013. Hardcover, 488 pages, $24. Fifty years after his death, the Irish born but British bred scholar, apologist, and novelist C. S. Lewis remains incredibly popular in America, where...

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.

To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor

Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress

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