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.”

The Unknown Hegel

The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right by Paul Edward Gottfried. Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986, Revised edition 2010. Paper, $24. Few prominent postwar conservative thinkers have credited Hegelian concepts...

Kirk’s Ghostly Tales

Jeffrey D. Pearce recently guest edited two “lib guides”—thematic lists of reading resources—for the library of Everett Community College in Everett, Washington. In “Ghostly Sightings...And Other Scary Stories...”, Pearce links to Russell Kirk’s short story anthology...

Glory and Indignity

John Randolph of Roanoke by David Johnson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012 Cloth, 352 pages, $45. “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality.” Thus spoke John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833), one of the most curious, animated figures ever...

Sir Henry Sumner Maine on Democracy

Popular Government, by Henry Sumner Maine. Introduction by George W. Carey. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics [1885, 1976] [free online PDF edition at Liberty Fund]. It has been a good many years since the democratic political system, and all the principles upon which it...

Faith and Twelve Presidents

The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents: From Truman to Obama by David L. Holmes. University of Georgia Press, 2012 296 pages, $30.Since the founding of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies in the early seventeenth century, religion has powerfully affected...

History Resurgent

Historical Consciousness, or The Remembered Past by John Lukacs. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. [Rev ed. Transaction 1994, 411 pages.] “You couldn’t be more right,” is the warm affirmation of an amiable friend of mine that I would like to apply to this book. Dr....

Enoch Powell—Right from the start?

Enoch at 100 Edited by Greville Howard. London: Biteback, 2012, hardback, 320pp., £25. A century after his birth, the self-described “Tory anarchist” John Enoch Powell is still capable of arousing devotion or detestation. After his death in 1998, a major memorial...

Rediscovering a Neglected Conservative Mind

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, by James Fitzjames Stephen. Edited by Stuart D. Warner. Liberty Fund, Inc., 1993 xxix + 270 pp., $19.50 cloth; $7.50, paper. Although proclaimed by Sir Ernest Barker as “the finest exposition of conservative thought in the later half of...

A summary of the Conservative Mind

Aaron McLeod, a former Wilbur Fellow, has written an excellent Summary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, the first number in the Alabama Policy Institute’s “Essential Readings for the Modern Conservative” series. Aaron takes 70 pages to explain the themes 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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