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.”

Deinstitutionalizing the Humanities?

So the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report defending the humanities. It wasn’t a very resolute defense, and it seemed somewhat desperate. The result was all kinds of articles that were more about recording than resisting the humanities’ decline and...

Family and Faith: A Two-Way Street

An interview with Mary Eberstadt on How the West Really Lost God.The University Bookman is pleased to present this interview with Mary Eberstadt about her new book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization. Mary is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and...

Rushmore’s Odd Man Out

Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition by Jean M. Yarbrough. University of Kansas Press, 2012. Cloth, 337 pp., $40.Just what is the “American political tradition?” Better than sixty years ago the noted American historian, Richard Hofstadter, tried to...

The Personalism of The Conservative Mind

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60When the first edition of The Conservative Mind hit the book shelves on May 11, 1953, neither its author nor its publisher expected it to do as well as it did. And, doing “well” is a gross understatement. Nearly every major...

Reflections of a Conservative Liberal

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60In my recently published Edmund Burke in America, and also in an earlier review essay on conservative historians, I identified Russell Kirk as a highly successful “intellectual entrepreneur.” That term might imply either censure...

What Is the Legacy of ‘The Conservative Mind’?

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60The sixtieth anniversary ofthe publication of The Conservative Mind marks a major milestone in the history of the post-World War II conservative intellectual movement. Nearly all contemporary conservative writers, including those...

Life Is Worth Living

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60In the final chapter of his final book, The Sword of Imagination, Russell Kirk writes that during his 75 years, filled with more honors and blessings than the most celebrated among us experience, he had sought three ends: To...

The Joyful Conservative

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60In her Heritage Foundation Lecture titled “The Conservative Heart: Life with Russell Kirk,” Annette Kirk recounts an episode that occurred partway through her nearly thirty-year marriage. It seems that one of Kirk’s college-age...

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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