The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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Burke Endures
The Enduring Edmund Burke, edited by Ian Crowe. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997. 221pp., $25 cloth.1997 marked the bicentenary of Edmund Burke’s death, the perfect occasion to measure the enduring relevance of his thought. What endures, amply evident from this...
Bloodied Beauty
The Poetics of Evil: Toward an Aesthetic Theodicy by Philip Tallon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Cloth, 266 pages, $74.While preparing an anthology, I once spent several months researching the “problem of evil.” I remember learning about genocides. Not...
True Ethical Humanism
Rousseau and Romanticism, by Irving Babbitt. With a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn. Transaction Publishers, 1991. This reprint of the best-known work by Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) is a sturdy addition to Transaction’s Library of Conservative Thought. When it was...
Looking Forward and Back
The Bookman has had a banner 2012! This past year, we have seen all forms of our traffic increase, and we published in 2012 over sixty new reviews and articles, with weekly selections from our incomparable archives. Some highlights from the past year include our...
A Player Piano for the Twenty-First Century
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Dial Press 1999 [1952] Paper, 352 pages, $15.I have long resisted reading Kurt Vonnegut. In this life of finite time and seemingly infinite and ever expanding good things to read, his biography or writing just did not seem enough to...
On Quotations
On Essays and LettersOn my desk, I have a second edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The original edition was in 1941; the edition that I have is from 1960. I have seen reference to a fifth edition [seventh —Ed.]. The fourth edition advertisement said that...
Conversation in Collapse
The Conversation, Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. American Zoetrope / Paramount, 1974. 113 minutes.Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is one of the artsier entries in the long list of 1970s paranoia flicks. The film begins with a crane shot of a busy San...
The Real Charm of Oxford
On Essays and Letters“Yes, Oxford in September, in the quiet, the scarlet creeper, and the mist, is the Oxford of dreams and visions: ‘She needs not June for beauty’s heightenings’ (Matthew Arnold). And yet, you know the real charm of the place is not the quiet but...
The State of American Liberal Education These Days
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
