The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Defending the Christian Faith

“In 100 Tough Questions For Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today… David G. Bonagura, Jr. gives bite-sized answers to dozens of big questions about the faith.”

Geopolitics and the Making of the Modern World

“Brands’s book should find a ready audience among those interested in developments in the international scene over the last century. It is particularly effective in dealing with the threat that China’s emerging power and influence pose to the West today…”

The Context for Human Dignity

“While the twentieth century was still sporadically marked by remnants of Christian influence and dominance, the twenty-first has seen the final divorce of the secular and sacred, and the consequences are evident. What Leo XIII warned of, the evils he battled, have been let loose, paradigmatically captured by Artificial Intelligence which poorly imitates and devalues that which makes us essentially human… We would do well then to read Hittinger’s book in reflecting on how to face these challenges.”

Between Greatness and Hubris 

“At the core of [the book] is the notion that while America is an exceptional nation, we are not immune from the perils that beset past countries and empires.”

A summary of the Conservative Mind

Aaron McLeod, a former Wilbur Fellow, has written an excellent Summary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, the first number in the Alabama Policy Institute’s “Essential Readings for the Modern Conservative” series. Aaron takes 70 pages to explain the themes and...

A Global Life in Ideas

Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick by Peter Collier. New York: Encounter Books, 2012. 241 pp. $26.Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was the intellectual giant of the first four years of the Reagan administration. After Reagan swept to a forty-nine-state...

Notes on the Cultural Revolution

The present age is distinguished by this: in the quest for a better life, man has chosen increasingly to put his faith in natural science. More than a century of unparalleled activity in that area of research has given a new bent to the imagination of several...

A Forward-Thinking Conservatism

There has been much commentary concerning a recent David Brooks editorial that in turn cites Rod Dreher’s article on what it means to be a conservative. Both Brooks and Dreher return to Kirk and his ten principles of conservatism, to define what Brooks describes as...

Omnipotence Is Provisional

A conversation with Will Self.Will Self was born in London in 1961 and published his first book of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, in 1991. To date he has published nine novels, three novellas, six collections of short fiction, and six books of...

The Anatomy of the Good

Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices by Jennifer A. Herdt. University of Chicago Press, [2008] 2012. Paper, 467 pages, $35.“’Tis hard to believe,” wrote Michel de Montaigne in his essay “On Virtue,” “that these so elevated qualities in a man can so...

Natural Law or Nihilism?

Natural Law or Nihilism?

The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky by Russell Kirk. Regnery Gateway (1987), 132 pp. Although Dr. Kirk knows how hard the tempest of our time really rages, he has not fled or been driven to the heath like Lear or Lear’s fool. His insight is...

Endless Game of Thrones

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin (5 of 7 planned volumes). Bantam, 1996–2012. Paper, 5232 pages, $75.   The embarrassment of narrative in a radically skeptical postmodern world is that it implies meaning. Simply constructing a story with beginning,...

Dos Passos: A Reassessment

Dos Passos: A Reassessment

Jean-Paul Sartre once called John Dos Passos [1896–1970] “the greatest novelist of the century,” a judgment which he did not hold alone.[1] Yet now, though Dos Passos has continued to write, few seem willing to rate him so highly. His biographer, John Wrenn, states...

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

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