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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

Conservative Mind at 60

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk's influential book, The Conservative Mind. Kirk Center Vice-Chairman Jeffrey O. Nelson has written an op-ed for the Detroit News to celebrate the occasion and offer an assessment of the...

Editor’s Introduction

The 2011 volume of Studies in Burke and His Time follows a four year gap in publication. This lapse reflects, in part, the economic conditions of our times, and the struggle to acquire the necessary funding to continue publication. Fortunately, through the support of...

The Perils of Neutrality

The Common Good of Constitutional Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy and on Catholic Social Teaching by Martin Rhonheimer, edited by William F. Murphy, Jr. Catholic University of America Press, 2013. Paperback, 560 pages, $45. This collection of essays is...

Capitalism vs. the Free Market

The Morality of Capitalism: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You edited by Tom Palmer. Jameson Books, Inc., 2011. Paperback, 129 pp., $8.95. Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert Sirico. Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2012. Hardcover, 213...

Tolkien and the Great Tale

The Christian World of ‘The Hobbit’ by Devin Brown. Abingdon Press, 2012 193 pp., $14.99 paper.J. R. R. Tolkien’s fame as a founder of modern fantasy and as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century is assured. But he is still often not recognized...

Farming, Community, and Culture

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, by Wendell Berry. Pantheon Books 1994, 208 pp., $20, cloth; $10 paper. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely. —Edmund Burke Wendell Berry’s career has spanned more than thirty years and this newest collection...

Marital Distress and the 2012 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize

Stag’s Leap: Poems, by Sharon Olds. Knopf, 2012. 112 pages, Hardcover, $27; Paperback, $17.On January 15, 2013, the Poetry Book Society in London announced that the winner of the annual T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (awarded to the best new collection of poetry...

Studies in Burke and His Time

Studies in Burke and His Time

Welcome to Studies in Burke and His Time, the journal of the Edmund Burke Society of America. Our journal editors are Elizabeth Lambert and Michael Brown, and the executive editor is Ian Crowe. Please direct all articles, review submissions, and correspondence in the...

(The Future of) Liberalism in Our Disordered Age

Post-Liberalism: The Death of a Dream by Melvyn L. Fein. Transaction Press, 2012. Cloth, 359 pages, $40.Reality is never as we think of it. Yet we must live, act, think, choose, and find our place within some story about reality that purports to lay out the...

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.

To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor

Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress

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