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.

From the Man Who Loved America

“Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy.”

Smithian Wisdom on Demand

“Even readers who disagree with the collection’s broad normative valence will find that it consistently models a way of reading Smith as a unified thinker about persons-in-society—morally formed agents embedded in evolving rules, conventions, and institutions.”

In Praise of Poetry and Form

“Majmudar often takes the long view, and from the long view, free verse is a new arrival in a variegated poetic history that stretches back into prehistory. To embrace it alone is to cut oneself off from that sweeping history and from the resources to be found there. There is still vitality in these neglected traditions. They are not a dead past.”

Conversation in Collapse

The Conversation, Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. American Zoetrope / Paramount, 1974. 113 minutes.Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is one of the artsier entries in the long list of 1970s paranoia flicks. The film begins with a crane shot of a busy San...

The Real Charm of Oxford

On Essays and Letters“Yes, Oxford in September, in the quiet, the scarlet creeper, and the mist, is the Oxford of dreams and visions: ‘She needs not June for beauty’s heightenings’ (Matthew Arnold). And yet, you know the real charm of the place is not the quiet but...

The State of American Liberal Education These Days

What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville...

Having It Both Ways

Having It Both Ways

Novelist and poet James Lasdun speaks with the Bookman about why he feels violence is an important theme to be explored in poetry, how Chekhov modernized him as a writer, and why an industrial wasteland in New Jersey inspired the milieu for one of his novels.

Back to the Sources, Almost

Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 2006, cloth, 184 pages, $35. Reviewed by John Byron Kuhner Augustine, in praising God’s choice to place Adam and Eve in a garden that needed tending, waxed poetic. “When all is said and...

A Road Not Taken

A conversation with Michael Brendan DoughertyIn a pair of recent articles for the American Conservative, Michael Brendan Dougherty—who may also be the only conservative to grace the Apollo Theater stage—has been exploring a path not taken by the Republican Party, but...

A Conservative Scholar’s Wisdom

The Case for Conservatism by Francis Graham Wilson, with a new introduction by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers [1951, 1969, 1990, 2011], 74 pp., $20 paper. Forty years have passed since Francis Wilson first published the three lectures contained in this elegant...

Annette Kirk Remembers Valerie Eliot

Kirk Center President Annette Kirk has written a brief remembrance of Valerie Eliot, their meetings, and the literary friendship of their late husbands.

Mrs. Kirk on Valerie Eliot (1926–2012)

When a handsome, statuesque Valerie Eliot entered the restaurant at which we met in June 1999, the pianist broke into selections from the musical Cats, much to the delight of my two daughters who a decade earlier had attended that musical in London with Russell and...

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.

@ubookman The series seeks to advance understanding of the significance of the American founding to our times through fresh, concise presentations. The following piece by @ubookman editor @lsheahan sets the stage: https://buff.ly/Aakgs0W

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, @ubookman 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.

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