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.
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
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...
Searching while Blindfolded
A comment on a silly piece by Russell Jacoby.
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 Relevance of T. S. Eliot
Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century by Russell Kirk. New York: Random House, 1972. [ISI 2008, 460 pages, paper, $18.] Among all the studies that have been made of the works of T. S. Eliot, too many have been concerned with how...
Founders’ Faith: None of the Above
The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution by Gregg L. Frazer. University Press of Kansas, 2012, 296 pp., $35. The religious views of America’s founders have been fiercely contested in the public arena for many years. The principal...
America Is Hard to See
The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny by Orestes A. Brownson [1865]. Reprinted by Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers: Clifton, New Jersey, 1972.[ISI 2002] It is always a great intellectual experience to examine the operations of a powerful,...
On the Long March of the Wolves through the Sheep-pen
Intellectuals and Society: Revised and Expanded Edition by Thomas Sowell. New York: Basic Books, 2012, 669 pages, $19.99. In her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor promenades a remarkable gallery of grotesques through the life of her protagonist Hazel Motes, a...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
