The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Defending the Christian Faith

100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today By David Bonagura Jr. Sophia Institute Press, 2025. Paperback, 176 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by David Weinberger.  n the day to day trenches of adult life,” writes David Foster...

Lessons from Sparta

“…Sparta’s Third Attic War and its predecessors are philosophical meditations on such weighty issues as the rise and fall of civilizations and the fundamental motives of major players within these civilizations.”

The Character of the People is the Character of the Regime

“To see why ‘realism’ is inadequate as a paradigm, Rahe seeks to rehabilitate the old idea of grand strategy as crucial for the competent study of international affairs.”

Defending the Christian Faith

100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today By David Bonagura Jr. Sophia Institute Press, 2025. Paperback, 176 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by David Weinberger.  n the day to day trenches of adult life,” writes David Foster...

Political Correctness and the War Against Authority

Society Against Itself: Political Correctness and Organizational Self-Destruction by Howard S. Schwartz, Karnac Books, 2010. Paper, 240 pp. The congeries of ideological positions known as “political correctness” has long posed a threat to Western civilization. As an...

Witness over Sixty Years

Witness by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, 1952) Visitors to Ronald Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo, just north of Santa Barbara, will discover that the late president’s large bookshelf, just inside the front door of the main house, is filled largely with books on Western...

Fall Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Fall 2011) has just been posted. It features a profile of the new complete Kirk Bibliography, compiled by our archivist, Charles C. Brown. It also includes an interview with Márcia Xavier de Brito, who is...

Celebrated Minor Contemporary American Poetry

The Best American Poetry 2011 Edited by Kevin Young with David Lehman Scribner (New York, NY), 2011, xxvi + 211 pp., $35.00 Consider the following—“Rally”—the first poem in this year’s annual Best American Poetry series, reproduced in its entirety: The awesome weight...

‘The Greatest Fool That Ever Lived’

On Essays and Letters“It is easier to believe that one’s self is a fool than that Socrates was a fool; and yet, if he was not right, he must have been the greatest fool that ever lived.” —Robert Lynd, “On Not Being a Philosopher.” In book six of the Republic, the...

Lukacs and Kennan: Reflections on a Friendship

A Lukacs SymposiumThere are relationships, Michael Oakeshott once wrote, “in which no result is sought and which are engaged in for their own sake and enjoyed for what they are and not for what they provide. This is so of friendship.” John Lukacs could not have known,...

The Awful Responsibility of Time

John Lukacs and the Problem of American History A Lukacs SymposiumSoon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946) Throughout...

John Lukacs as Teacher

A Lukacs Symposium John P. Rossi For years the Reader’s Digest had a feature entitled “The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met.” For me that was John Lukacs and the meeting took place in 1955 during my sophomore year at La Salle College. As a freshman I had heard...

John Lukacs: Biblical Historical Thinking

A Lukacs SymposiumLike Pontius Pilate, “whom,” John Lukacs says, “I could never contemplate without a modicum of sympathy,”[1] this Hungarian historian is curious to know the character of truth, its personality. He regards it as a “misconception” that historians can...

The Book Gallery

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

Paul Rahe's Lessons from Sparta. Jeffrey Folks on "Sparta’s Third Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 413-404 B.C." @EncounterBooks

The Character of the People is the Character of the Regime. @TalcottNYC on "Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 418-413 B.C." by Paul A. Rahe. @EncounterBooks @NewSaintAndrews

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