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.

How Charlotte Brontë Became Charlotte Brontë

“Graham Watson’s biography of Charlotte is a judiciously researched and well-written overview of the final years of Charlotte’s life… readers will learn just how central Charlotte was to the literary establishment that both praised and scorned her.”

C.S. Lewis and Gender Ideology

“…[Herring] hopes that his exploration of Lewis’ work will inspire and equip Christian readers to understand and respond to our culture’s gender confusion.”

The Case for the Messiah

“…Catholic Answers apologist Jimmy Akin… explores the ancient Jewish idea of the Messiah, along with the historical evidence for Christ, arguing that Jesus is indeed the anointed one foretold in the Old Testament.”

Straussians, Founders, and the Faith

Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique by Grant Havers. Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 256 pp., $37. Grant Havers’s study of the Straussian persuasion may be too relentlessly honest to win applause from mainstream...

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’

‘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...

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.

Subscribe and receive the Bookman weekly in your inbox.

* indicates required

Shop through Creed and Culture Publishing