The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

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.”

How to Love What is Permanent

“Throughout the book, Gibbs pleads with his readers that we not only think of the soul in terms of salvation but also in terms of health. Good taste won’t save one’s soul. But it will nourish the soul and incline the soul towards virtue much more than the bad taste we will acquire from mediocre things.”

Personalism in the Age of AI

“Personalism is a philosophical movement that places the human person at the center of inquiry, affirming the inherent dignity, value, and uniqueness of each individual. While it spans both religious and secular traditions, its common thread is a commitment to defending the irreducible reality of the person in an age increasingly shaped by systems, technologies, and abstractions.”

Christopher Dawson and Pluralism

“In particular, I want to examine three aspects of Dawson’s thought: his conclusion that cultures, especially Western culture, historically have been pluralist; his contention that a pluralism of cultures preserves a sphere of freedom from dominant modern ideologies that would eliminate that freedom; and finally, Dawson’s conviction that a pluralist world represents a new opportunity for evangelization.”

To College Students Considering a Course in American Poetry

I dwell in Possibility — Emily Dickinson Those who attend or are about to attend college may be surprised todiscover the confluence and influence of great poetry written in English at the beginning of the last century. Whether you agree or disagree with the often dark...

The Bookman goes back to school

The University Bookman has long had a focus on education. Indeed, the archive reveals numerous reviews of college and high-school textbooks, and of course our founder Russell Kirk wrote often on education. As we approach the beginning of another school year, we asked...

The Declaration as the Constitution

Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question by Harry V. Jaffa. Regnery Gateway, 1994, 386 pp., $24 hardcover. Conservatives today are generally devoted to the scheme of constitutional interpretation known as “original intent...

Resisting Ideology’s Reductionism

The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State (2d expanded ed.) by Claes G. Ryn. National Humanities Institute, 2011, 163 pp., paper, $15.Near the end of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke praised what he called the “combining mind” as...

An American Classic

Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt. Foreword by Russell Kirk, Liberty Classics, 1979, 390 pp. The appearance of a new edition of Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership (first published in 1924) is one sign among many that interest in this controversial...

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...

The Book Gallery

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

How to Love What is Permanent
Sarah Reardon on "Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity" by Joshua Gibbs.
@CirceInstitute

Personalism in the Age of AI Grant R. Martsolf on "Personalism for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of David Walsh" Edited by Thomas W. Holman and Richard Avramenko.
@RLPublisher

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