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.”

Joseph Mitchell and the Free Life

Joseph Mitchell and the Free Life

Joseph Mitchell was born in Fairmont, North Carolina in 1908, the son of cotton and tobacco traders, Averette and Elizabeth Parker Mitchell. The family had a bit of money—enough to see Joe through the University of North Carolina in the late 1920s and, afterwards, to...

The Architecture of a Man’s Time

Essays: Personal and Impersonal, by Milton Hindus. Black Sparrow Press, 1988 191 pp., paper, $10.00. Milton Hindus’s Essays: Personal and Impersonal is not an encyclopaedic volume except for the climate of its thought, tolerantly revealing to Hindus and his reader...

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans, by Lawrence N. Powell. Harvard University Press, 2012. Cloth, 448 pages, $30. The city of New Orleans has long had a firm grip on the imagination of Americans (a grip that existed long before the round-the-clock news...

Mistaken Identities

America’s British Culture by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers, 1993. Cloth, 150 pages, $25.The “identity crisis” is a relatively recent development of human psychology. Most people in history were what they were, and they didn’t bother overmuch to wonder what that...

Union and Liberty

May the Road Rise Up to Meet You by Peter Troy. Doubleday, 2012, 400 pp., $27. “How you know whachu stitchin when it don’ look like nothing but a buncha threads ain’ got nothing t’do wit each otha?” asks the ten-year-old slave Mary as she watches her fellow slave and...

Subterranean Truths

Subterranean Truths

Lord of the Hollow Dark by Russell Kirk. St. Martin’s Press, 1979. $10.95. The best stories by a living American in what is commonly called the supernatural are by Russell Kirk; notably in his collection The Princess of All Lands, which, despite differences in...

American Sound—Twentieth Century

Voices of Stone and Steel: The Music of William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter Mennin by Walter Simmons. Scarecrow Press, 2010 Cloth, 438 pages, $70. In his epochal study Voices in the Wilderness (2008), musicologist Walter Simmons charted the careers and...

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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