The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.
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The University Bookman
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Campaign Progress
Leviathan’s Predictable Servants
The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians by John L. Stewart. Princeton University Press, 1965. Hardcover, 566 pages. The rewriting of the social, political, economic, and legal history of our nation’s most conservative and (from the perspective of “presentist”...
Fall Newsletter
We are pleased to release the Fall 2013 Permanent Things, the latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter, featuring updates on recent events and seminars at the Center—and marking 40 years of ISI seminars at the Center!
Can Rationalism Make it in the Long Run?
Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 2012 Hardcover, 250 pages $50. Paperback, 200 pages, $40.Gene Callahan’s Oakeshott on Rome and America brings Oakeshott’s famous critique of Rationalism to bear upon the concrete...
Rescuing Rockwell
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Hardcover, 512 pages, $28. The art critic Deborah Solomon has performed a rescue operation of the first rank in her new biography, American Mirror: The Life and...
A Reader’s Guide to the Most Brutal Century
A Short History of the Twentieth Century by John Lukacs. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2013. Hardcover, 230 pp. $25. This book is a gem—a highly readable and insightful analysis of what the author, John Lukacs, calls the short twentieth century, which he dates...
An Aesthetic Vision on West 43rd Street
An Evening with the Poet C. P. CavafyOn November 18, 2013 at The Town Hall in New York City, the PEN American Center presented an evening tribute to the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy in celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth. The readers and speakers included the...
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...
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.
